Possession: A Romance

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Byatt really has done a succesful tour de force in recreating the Victorian time period: the book contains lots of long poems and stories in this Victorian style, very concise, meticulously detailed, full of mythological references and floral and animal descriptions. But it was just possible that Ash's own Vico had marginalia missed even by the indefatigable Cropper.

It divided her into cold, brightly coloured fires… The green silk of her scarf glittered with turreted purple ridges. In short, the whole book is a gigantic tease – which is certainly satisfying on an intellectual level" but, "Possession's true centre is a big, red, beating heart. There's a fascinating fight over spiritual beliefs that I don't have the headspace to deal with now, but is haunting the back of my head, and I expect to be obsessed with it the next time I read it.

He first has to let the machine warm up, and then: "in the dim and hum of the extractor fan he took out the two letters and read them again. I say “at home” what extraordinary folly- when you take pleasure in making me feel most unhemlich , as the Germans have it, least of all at home, but always on edge… But poets don’t want homes- do they?

The set-up of the grad student/teaching assistant/temp couple, living in a dank basement, banned from the garden, and feeding off of each other in passive-aggressive co-dependency was .and electrical message-network of various desires, ideological beliefs and responses, language-forms and hormones and pheromones. I thought, I can't do that because, (A) the Browning scholars might sue for libel, and (B) that left me no room for invention. The quote at the top of this review is true of this novel, as well as the fictional biography it is describing (Cropper’s one of RHA). But that doesn’t do byatt justice: she created two characters who are flesh and blood in their own right, and gave them poetic voices that are incredibly personalized… what a delight! Possession is set both in the present day and the Victorian era, contrasting the two time periods, as well as echoing similarities and satirising modern academia and mating rituals.

In it, LaMotte explains that she had given birth to a daughter who had lived happily without knowing her parentage.The story constantly jumps from between the modern setting to a Victorian love story and is told in the various forms of letters, poems, essays, and straightforward narrative. In connection with that, I wonder if you have thought of Vico's history of the primitive races--of his idea that the ancient gods and later heroes are personifications of the fates and aspirations of the people rising in figures from the common mind? This curiosity was a kind of predictive familiarity; he knew the workings of the other man’s mind, he had read what he had read, he was possessed of his characteristic habits of syntax and stress.

I mean, just to rattle off a few: feminism, post-modernism, living in a post-modern world, deconstructionism, many many issues of religion and spirituality, cultural relativism and archetypes, living in a globalized world, negotiating the self in relationships, the academic life and petty infighting, etc, etc.Did you not find it as strange as I did, that we should so immediately understand each other so well? They all assume that the lock of hair in Ash's grave belongs to LaMotte and that he never learnt the truth about his daughter. I've also wondered for some time if my anti-AS prejudice was a bit daft and thought I should give her another – fairer – reading. You can change your choices at any time by visiting Cookie preferences, as described in the Cookie notice.