Golden lads and girls all must/As chimney sweepers, come to dust

Byatt, A.S. The Children's Book. New York: Knopf, 2009.

I love A.S. Byatt. I think her Booker Prize-winning novel Possession (1990) is one of the best novels of the past 25 years, and still the best (and also, I think, the originator) of the "present day researchers investigate lives of interesting past people, but only the reader gets the whole story" books. In some ways Byatt writes Victorian novels but includes the bits that the Victorians disregarded or spoke about only euphemistically or didn't notice at all--sex, class, gender.

The Children's Book, which was a finalist for the Booker, follows an interconnected set of artists and families, mostly in England but a little in Germany, from 1895 until 1919. The central figure is Olive Wellwood, modeled on the writer E. Nesbit, a writer of children's stories, along with her husband, her sister and their clan of children. As the novel opens Olive is visiting the new Albert Museum to speak to one of its staff members, Prosper Cain, about objets d'art suitable to build stories on; in the underside of the museum Tom Wellwood and Julian Cain, sons of their respective parents, find a boy their age, Phillip Warren, who's run away from his family in the potteries to be--though Phillip himself is fairly inarticulate about this--an artist, not just a worker. Phillip is deposited in due course in the household of the sculptor Benedict Fludd (modeled on Eric Gill in most respects), who is brilliant but also mad by turns, and from there events spool out.

( Good fiction rather than bad lying )

So, um, about that other Avatar movie...

Is it just me, or does this paragraph contain some very problematic tropes stereotypes narratives statements? (I'm not sure which word is best; thoughts?)

Humans can’t breathe the air on Pandora; Jake lies in a casket-like vessel, while his consciousness, projected into an “avatar”—Vishnu-blue and nine feet tall, like the native population, the Na’vi—explores Pandora’s rich interior. It is a fantasy about fantasy, about the experience of sitting inert in the dark while your mind enters another world. Set roughly a hundred and twenty-five years in the future, “Avatar” is, like most speculative science fiction, a cautionary tale. Humans have turned Earth into a wasteland and, in their pursuit of a precious superconductor called Unobtanium, are beginning to do the same to Pandora. Jake, through his avatar, falls in love with a Na’vi princess, who teaches him to live in harmony with nature, and then he leads her people in an insurrection against the colonists. … This summer, addressing an auditorium filled with thousands of teen-age boys at Comic-Con, in San Diego—an annual convention of science-fiction, action-adventure, and fantasy fans—he [Cameron] made his identification with the fair sex complete. When someone in the audience asked about his next movie, he replied, “You know, it’s not a great time to ask a woman if she wants to have other kids when she’s crowning.”
–from "Man of Extremes: The Return of James Cameron" by Dana Goodyear

Because, you know, the natives totally need a white guy to show them how it's done, and princesses can never lead their people themselves. TRUFAX.