An (unintentionally) funny chapter in The Children's Book

Well into A.S. Byatt's "The Children's Book" there's a chapter in which all of the children of the various families and their "tutors" go off to the woods on a camping weekend - a nice, bucolic moment in this long novel - and at the outset Byatt takes a few paragraphs to say something about each of the characters and what they're doing at the outing. It's unintentionally (I think) hilarious! There are so many damn characters in this novel, and it's literally impossible to distinguish one from another. Byatt jams the stage with names, and many of the characters are no more than a name - and we're meant to keep them straight? People wince about the great Russian novels, but Tolstoy's a breeze compared with this. What makes it worse is Byatt's inability to or uninterest in developing her main characters. She gets a plot line going and then abandons it. What happened to Tom, Philip, Julian - so effectively introduced in the early chapters and now pushed aside (Tom) or virtually forgotten (Philip)? The adult men are mostly monstrous and self-indulgent; the adult women are mostly feckless or clueless. That leaves us with the younger generation. But whom in this group do we really know anything about? More and more as the novel progesses it appears that Dorothy is the center - victim of abuse, she heads off to Germany, then to medical school. But we know nothing at all about her interior life, and other than her confidence that she can beat the odds and prejudices and become a doctor, what do we know or care about her at all? She could of course be a protagonist in a conventional novel, but we'd really have to see her confront her demons and we just don't. There so much in this book - which gives the author leeway to focus on so little.