An unerring ability to avoid the dramatic : A.S. Byatt

At some point late in "The Children's Book" one of the characters (Cain) who's marrying off his pregnant daughter to avoid shame and scandal remarks that he's become a character in a 2nd-rate melodrama - and funny and daring thing for an author to have one of her characters say - but would that it were so. TCB is anything but a 2nd-rate melodrama - it's 3rd-rate at best. A.S. Byatt continues to show her unerring instinct for avoid dramatic situations and conflicts whenever possible, this cited example being the case in point, as the troubled Florence suddenly and inexplicably marries some weird Austrian doctor whom she barely knows and slips her way off the edge of the plot. Or: the troubled young man Tom is very saddened that his tree house (where he and siblings had always retreated during childhood) has been illegally chapped down by the gamekeeper (someone whom Tom apparently used to work with and know? Byatt hints at this but does nothing with this plot element). When he takes his sister Dorothy to see the ruins, all they do is look at them and kind of shrug. Can't Byatt do more with this? Couldn't anyone? No - every time she gets a chance to starts into one of these endless chapters that describe either an art exhibit (I'm so sick of pottery) or one of the so-called experiemental plays that Olive is always working on: puppetry, odd lighting, marionettes, live actors, childhood tales and fables. It is very hard for a writer to describe another art form, and Byatt is good at it, but she way overdoes it to no clear end or effect. Olive's play, now called Tom Underground, sounds as if it's destined to be a flop, and it's a clear ripoff of Peter Pan, which the characters saw earlier in this novel, and perhaps the critics will note that? I can't tell if Byatt means that to be a flaw of Olive's play or if she's not even aware of how derivative this tale - boy loses his shadow, etc. - is, or sounds.