The Children's Book. A.S. Byatt. Knopf. 688 pages. $26.95.

Rich with period detail and sublime storytelling, A.S. Byatt's supremely fulfilling new novel is fat, busy and wondrous, jammed with a staggering amount of history, with characters and ideas that demand attention and threaten to overwhelm even the most avid reader. Only they don't.

Shortlisted for The Man Booker Prize -- and no wonder -- The Children's Book is mind-boggling in ambition, a mesmerizing exploration of, well, everything: families, secrets, love, innocence, corruption, art, the desire for knowledge, nature, politics, war, sex, power. Even puppetry.

The novel follows the lives of a group of mostly avant-garde families in and around Kent. It stretches luxuriously from the latter days of the idealistic Victorian era, when British social consciences (some of them, anyway) were tweaked by London's unthinkable poverty, through the rise of the Edwardians and the onset of World War I.

The Wellwoods -- Olive and Humphrey, Olive's unobtrusive sister Violet and seven children -- form the story's central thread, but their friends and extended family prove equally instrumental. So many characters to keep track of -- we're in Russian-novel territory here -- and yet Byatt makes them all distinct.

Olive writes fairy tales for children. Humphrey writes political essays calling for societal changes but never does anything practical to instigate them. But the Wellwoods are generous, offering shelter to an impoverished teenager found hiding in a museum basement sketching pottery. Philip, the budding artist, captures Olive's imagination. Most things interest Olive. But she unnerves him with her chatter.

``She's a storyteller,'' Violet explains. ``She's making up stories for you. . . . It's her way. She's fitting you in.''

Making up stories is where Byatt excels, too. Like Olive's disturbing tales -- about a boy whose shadow is stolen by a rat or a girl who imprisons small fairy folk in her dollhouse and then is captured by a giant who puts her in a cage -- The Children's Book hints at dark motives and dangerous journeys. And yet so much is free and easy. There are intricately planned Midsummer Eve parties, where the guests -- ``socialists, anarchists, Quakers, Fabians, artists, editors, freethinkers and writers'' -- dress in costume and behave as foolishly as children. The younger generation, ``at the end of the nineteenth century, were different from children before or after. They were neither dolls nor miniature adults. They were not hidden away in nurseries, but present at family meals, where their developing characters were taken seriously and rationally discussed. . . . And yet, at the same time, the children in this world had their own separate, largely independent lives.''

The Children's Book follows these children through young adulthood, wreathing them in beguiling fairy tales, a shocking array of secrets, malignant realities.

Tom Wellwood, a Peter Pan, doesn't want to grow up, especially after a harrowing stint at boarding school. His sister Dorothy welcomes the future but only if she is allowed to study to become a doctor. Her cousin Griselda is unhappily destined to be a debutante, while Griselda's brother Charles calls himself Karl and dabbles in socialism. Philip becomes an apprentice to a brilliant but deeply disturbed potter whose household languishes under a puzzling, unnamed dread; Philip's sister Elsie shows up with unexpected news. Other young people -- the Fludds, the Cains -- discover passions, fall in love, plan futures or remain trapped by family dramas. Eventually, there are far too many deaths.

Byatt has touched on similar themes in such novels as the Booker-winning Possession, The Biographer's Tale, Angels and Insects and the four installments of her Yorkshire quartet (The Virgin in the Garden, Still Life, Babel Tower and A Whistling Woman). She's intrigued by intellectual quests and the life of the mind and how such things work against our weak, too-willing flesh. The characters of The Children's Book may be Victorians, may adore discussing the intricacies of the Boer War or women's suffrage, but they spend a shocking amount of time in each other's beds.

``An illusion is a complicated thing,'' Byatt writes, and she's right: The illusion of virtue and good intentions proves impossible for her characters to maintain over time. But why should they be any different from the historical figures of the era: Oscar Wilde, George Bernard Shaw, Rupert Brook? In the end, we are human. We are weak, and we fall easily. Reality trumps mystery. But there are moments to remember. ``It was magical,'' Byatt writes of the Wellwoods' best Midsummer celebration. ``Everyone agreed it was magical.'' There is wonder everywhere, especially if you open this book.

Connie Ogle is The Miami Herald's book editor.

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