BRISTLING WITH DILIGENCE

James Wood on A.S. Byatt in the London Review of Books.

It is hard enough, though not for the Booker judges, to like the historical novel nowadays, but harder still when that novel's conception of characterisation seems itself antiquarian, as if Woolf and Proust and Chekhov, not to mention Muriel Spark and Penelope Fitzgerald, had never existed. Byatt's formidable research commands respect, but it is hard fully to respect a novel in which Rodin, Oscar Wilde, Emma Goldman and Marie Stopes have...