I've often heard people say that children have more intense feelings than adults. That may or may not be based on any particular psychological insight; it's true there was a time when I would get insanely excited about, say, putting the sprinkles on an ice cream sundae, an experience that would barely get my attention these days (actually I can't remember the last time I bothered with sprinkles, since I figured out they don't really taste like anything).

But when it comes to art, at least, there is some adult stuff in the world that is so complex and rich and gorgeous or hideous that I can't help but come under its power, as ineluctably as if I were a child being offered ice cream, and the effect is far more powerful than just about anything I was capable of experiencing as a kid.

I'm thinking about this because A.S. Byatt's The Children's Book is (as you might guess) deeply interested in the subject of childhood, but it's also a majestically grown-up novel, and it exerted a powerful influence on me. That's partly because fairy tales, the Victorian period, and World War I are easy buttons to push to get me to have strong feelings about a story, but a great deal of credit is due to Byatt's incredibly fine control over her language. Some of the simplest sentences in this book made me sigh and curl around the book a little tighter, not for being unusual or pivotal or innovative, just for being perfect:

"Olive believed she was a wonderful party-giver, and this belief was infectious, though not entirely well founded."

"Tom had a feeling he immediately remembered, though he had never learned to expect it. Olive in the flesh, Olive perfumed with attar of roses, was not the secret sharer of the otherworld, to whom he wrote letters. That was a kind of second self, who wrote him and inhabited his dreams. This was a lively, sociable woman in creamy broderie anglaise."

So I sighed a lot, but speaking objectively, is it a good book? I can tell you that it is stunningly beautiful. Byatt is without question one of the greatest living artists of the English language, and, better yet, much of this novel is about beautiful things and the experience of beauty. I can tell you that it broke my heart in at least three different ways (suddenly and shockingly, quietly and poetically, and, when it came to the First World War, brutally and inevitably). It is a masterful, epic portrayal of an era and how it ultimately undid itself in the most violent way imaginable.

This last aspect--the novel as portrait of a time--is also the novel's weakest point. Byatt's research shows in whole chapters about historical events, and the narrative voice shifts there into something very closely resembling a lecture (or Bill Bryson's At Home, an unfocused nonfiction work which I was halfway through when I picked up this book). I would have liked to see this aspect of the novel more integrated, and I was enough aware of the problem while reading that I did decide to bump the book down to four stars. (That, and there's a character who's consistently referred to as Charles/Karl through most of the book, and I found this obnoxious.) The Children's Book was shortlisted for the Booker when Wolf Hall won. The ambition of the two books is on a similar scope, but I can see why Wolf Hall, the more consistent and focused of the two, carried the day.

But that doesn't mean I didn't love this novel. I loved it madly, and it left me haunted and unable to read anything else for the next few days. It is the rare book, for children or for adults, that achieves that effect.