The problem of having artists for parents

ANDY HEDGECOCK enjoys a novel for adults (by a writer of children’s fiction) that examines the fatal impact of a parent’s literary imaginings

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THE opening line of Philip Larkin’s poem This Be the Verse (“They f*** you up, your mum and dad”) seems uncannily accurate in relation to the offspring of children’s writers, particularly those who feature in their parents’ stories.

Christopher Robin Milne’s role in Winnie-the-Pooh triggered merciless bullying at school, while Vivian Burnett’s young adulthood was plagued by associations with his mother’s book, Little Lord Fauntleroy. Emotionally cryogenic parenting — and the caricature of his behaviour as Mr Toad in his father’s book, The Wind of the Willows — is widely believed to have prompted Alastair Grahame’s suicide.

The enchantment and trauma associated with the creation of children’s literature has inspired some fascinating adult novels: AS Byatt’s The Children’s Book, Charles Elton’s Mr Toppit and — a new addition to the list — Melissa Albert’s The Children.

Guinevere Sharp is a disenchanted thirty-something haunted by memories of her dysfunctional family and the baleful influence of the Ninth City books, a bestselling children’s portal fantasy written by her deceased mother, Edith.

Guin is half-heartedly promoting a sugar-coated memoir of her life with Edith. The book is ghostwritten despite her literary ambitions. Meanwhile, she struggles to cope with intrusive journalists, a bullying publicist, her mother’s fanatical admirers and a fractured relationship with Ennis, her brother.

Ennis, a conceptual artist who gained a scandalous reputation following a death at one of his installation-based exhibitions, has announced a new show with the title “Mother.” Guin, who has been estranged from Ennis for 20 years, fears he is about to reopen old wounds and plunge both their lives into crisis.

The narrative flits between the present-day countdown to Ennis’s exhibition and the siblings’ childhood in rural Vermont in the late 1990s.

As children, Guin and Ennis are resilient and relatively happy. They are also physically and emotionally neglected, their filthiness and anxieties seemingly unnoticed by their parents. Edith, frosty and distant, is obsessively committed to her craft. Their father, Llewellyn, a bitter and disillusioned painter, is distracted by a series of affairs with younger women.

There is a psychological watershed early in the narrative, when the children make a disturbing discovery: not only have they been stealthily co-opted into their mother’s Ninth City narratives, but their fictional avatars have made them celebrities by proxy.

This isn’t the only worm in the apple of the children’s lives in Vermont. Their charming three-story wooden house has unsettling qualities, particularly the seven-windowed third-floor room Edith uses for her writing. In addition, there are disquieting dreams, inexplicable injuries, mysterious artifacts, ambiguous interactions with adult visitors and an enigmatic — possibly sinister — caretaker.

We know from the outset that Edna and Llewellyn are doomed to die before their children reach adulthood and, as the story unfolds, there are adumbrations of the tragedy that will befall them.

Edith’s stories feature a godlike antagonist, known as the Architect, who steals children’s dreams to fuel the creation of new worlds. This figure may hint at redemptive self knowledge on Edith’s part; it may symbolise the dangers of artistic obsession; or it may be a supernatural entity that crosses from the world of the Ninth City into our own.

The book is packed with similar ambiguities. Until the end it’s hard to determine its genre. Gothic mystery? Psychological thriller? Supernatural horror? Literary metafiction? To say more would spoil the enjoyment of a deftly crafted revelation.

The Children, Melissa Albert’s first novel for adult readers, is packed with incident and idiosyncratic characters. It’s entertaining and thematically complex. There are reflections on the complex morality of creative work, while mysteries — both worldly and metaphysical — jostle for attention. Albert has revivified the tropes and symbolism of traditional fairytales. Her sentences are vivid and beautifully constructed — there are figures of speech as witty and melodic as Raymond Chandler’s.

But if there is a flaw, it is that the pacing is meticulously controlled apart from in the final scenes: these are overextended and, as a result, their impact is diminished.

Book Review / 13 September 2026 Duchamp: midwife of conceptual art 13 September 2026 ANDY HEDGECOCK relishes an enlightening and witty biography of one of the 20th century’s most restless and influential artists

Film of the week / 6 August 2026 Grandmother magic 6 August 2026 ANDY HEDGECOCK is charmed by a skilful adaptation of Tove Jansson’s lyrical portrait of three generations of a family, overcoming grief

Cinema / 23 July 2026 Film round-up: July 23, 2026 23 July 2026 ANGUS REID, ANDY HEDGECOCK and MARIA DUARTE review On The Sea, A Useful Ghost, Brunello: The Gracious Visionary, and Pinocchio Unstrung

Cinema / 16 July 2026 Film round-up: July 16, 2026 16 July 2026 ANDY HEDGECOCK, MARIA DUARTE and ANGUS REID review Synthetic Sincerity, Our Hero, Balthazar, Heartstopper Forever, and A Year In London