Possession

Rating:
Summary: Tripe and Punishment
Review: This is one of the most tedious books I have ever read, from the painstaking reproduction of turgid Victorian poetry to the unbelievably bad and predictable Scooby-Doo ending (A-ha! I knew it was the Professor under the mask all along!) Hundreds of pages of writing, and yet the characters remain caricatures throughout (what do they like? do they have interesting opinions about anything? what do they do when they aren't squabbling with each other?) I cannot recall one compelling sentence in the entire book. It's like trying to chew dust.

Rating:
Summary: Impossible not to be Possessed
Review: Read A.S. Byatt's 'Possession' is one of the highest challanges a reader can face. The novel is wonderful, but very demanding, not only because its length but also its structure. I had to read it twice in order to get better all the references and magic of Byatt's work and I still have the feeling that I'm missing many things.

To put in a nutshell the novel is the story of two British academics, who study two late poets Randolph Henry Ash and Christabel LaMotte. After finding some never seen letters of these writers, the scholars discover a secret love affair between the poets and start to investigate it and its consequence their lives and works. It is hard to classify this novel: it is part a drama, part a thriller and much of an analyze of the sexual behaviour of the Victorian Era and the '80s.

To begin with the title, the word 'possesion' allows many interpretations related to the novel. One of the academics, Roland, who is the first to find and steal Ash's letters says he was possessed when he did it. Another good explanation is that he and the other academic. Maud, are so 'possessed' by the late poets that they revive the love affair. Or the word 'possession' refers to love itself: being in love is being possessed by some unknown entity. Ash says many times he was possessed by something he didn't know when in love with LaMotte. Possession may also be related to the obsession that all the academics can have to their object of study. All of them in the novel go deeper in the poets' lives than in their own, mainly Croppe. There are some other explanation that anyone can come up with after reading the novel. All of them can be right, all can be wrong.

As a modern work as it is, 'Possession' allows many interpretations and conclusion. Byatt's wrtinting is very semitotic: everything is related to everything. Acts from the past still have effect in the present time. Things that the poets did in the XIX century, interferes in the life of people in the late XX.

Another effective technique used by the author is the interrelationship of verse and prose. More than creating two characters who are poets, Byatt created their work. One can read many verses and tales written by these poets through the novel, and their meaning and importance are in a higher level. Their works are clues to understand their lives and their affair. And, yes, Byatt is this good. She can created verses as good as her prose and so different that one may doubt they were written by the same person. By the way, these kind of writing reads a bit hard at first, but once you get uesd to it, it is very pleasant to have many different sources as poems and letters than the plain narrative as usuall. The poets' letters are very vivid and beautiful, it is impossible not to be touched by their relationship and feel sorry for all the problems they have to face.

The comtemporany characters are very well developed also. Roland and Maud are the ones who face the most drastically change. Not only all the work they have developed about Ash and LaMotte have to change, but also their own private lives faces a challenge. The other three main academics, Croppe, Leonora and Blackadder, also see their working falling down. These characters are very realistic: it is not hard to find people who spent their whole lives devoted to study one single subject that they become obsessed to it.

Byatt's prose is insightfull and discriptive. Colours have an mayor role through the narrative. She uses many shades of colours just to give to the reader the right feeling of the moment, particularly green, that seems to be associated to the female pole of the novel. The sexual tension between the characters is very subtle. The differences between the Victiorians and the XX Century people is very thin, although we think we can point it out easily. Byatt's shows we still share some of the same doubts and fears that were so common in the other century.

All in all, 'Possession' is possessive. It is impossible not to fall for Byatt's writing and characters. After finishing the novel you got the actuall sense you've read a true story. It is impossible to believe that Ash and LaMotte have never been alive and lived that deep love affair.

Rating:
Summary: A Sumptuous Feast
Review: How does one begin to describe a book as gorgeous as "Possession?" Are there really words to describe the words?

"Possession" is definitely a romance but it is so much more than that. It is also a satire, an exploration, a diary, a critical essay a heady plunge into Victoriana and even a detective story of sorts.

The characters are all gems. Wonderful creations. Roland Michell, one notes almost immediately, is an academic to the very core. Although Roland may seem a bit of a bore in the very beginning of the story, once he steals the letters he so desperately wants, he becomes more of a flesh-and-blood character, more human, more fallible. Just as boring (in the beginning) as is Roland, so is Maud. These are two characters who are meant for each other, who only change when under each other's influence. While academic rivalry may be what sets the plot of this book in motion, it is love that becomes its driving force.

Much of the book is spent in the company of the fictitious Victorian writers, Randolph Ash and Christabel LaMotte and they are fascinating characters, indeed. Most of the chapters begin with a fictitious work by either Ash or LaMotte. Byatt has caught the spirit of both of these characters so well, that one could almost swear that Ash and LaMotte were real...and that they really wrote. Ash is the more open and terse writer; LaMotte the more given to patterns of rhythm and rhyme. Yet both writers are truly Victorians. Although many feel that Ash and LaMotte represented Robert Browning and Christina Rosetti, I felt that LaMotte was definitely Dickensian and Ash, very much Coleridge.

Byatt, one of the world's outstanding writers, has lavished such care and attention on "Possession" that each page, each paragraph, each poem, each letter, contains material that both soothes and stimulates the mind of the reader.

Although Byatt's writing may seem simple and straightforward enough, it is really exceedingly rich in both detail and allusion. In fact, there is so much literary detail and there are so many allusions in "Possession" that I think many readers might miss a few with a first reading. The readers who skip the letters and the poems are definitely making a huge mistake, for they form an integral part of the story; the book could not exist without them. The letters also give the reader (and Roland and Maud) a great deal of information about both Randolph and Christabel and allow the parallel relationships to come into being. And, if the reader gives them only half a chance, he or she will come to see that the letters and poems and fairy tales are rich and rewarding in and of themselves. It is no accident that both Christabel and Maud are identified with fairy tale characters who live in towers (Christabel with Melusina and Maud with Rapunzel).

Don't let the subject matter of the book put you off. Yes, failed romantic love has been done many times before and so have parallel relationships, but never quite in this way. Never so beautifully, never in such a way that touches the heart.

The only criticism I have of this book is that Byatt sometimes gave in to the lure of realism and let her characters speak in such a way as to almost tinge this book's exquisitely beautiful aura. Sure, in real life, people throwing a tirade don't take care to keep their language beautiful, but "Possession" isn't real life and we know it. That is a part of its lure and I only wish Byatt had felt the same. Expletives, in this book at least, do detract from the overall romantic and beautiful tone and from the otherwise equisiteness of Byatt's writing.

When it comes down to the final analysis, however, the above is simpy a quibble and "Possession" is a tremendous achievement. The characters are real and believable. We love them, we (sometimes) hate them, we pity them, we root for them. The 19th century seems as real as yesterday and Ash and LaMotte seem to have certainly existed, contrary to the very fact that we know they did not. The parallel relationships are braided and intertwined so carefully and beautifully that they can't help but capture both our heart and our soul.

"Possession" is a poetic, beautiful, exquisite novel that intricately weaves both the light and the dark aspects of love. It is a sumptuous feast of a book that is meant to be luxuriated in and ultimately, loved.

Rating:
Summary: Reconciling Past and Present: Possession, by A.S. Byatt
Review: "The book was thick and black and covered with dust." It is not a coincidence that the first two words of this remarkable novel are, "the book." Possession is a book about books, about the study and love of literature and the intricate obsession with the lives of literary figures shared by academics, historians, and the randomly curious public. It tells the story of a quiet literary scholar, Roland Michell, who finds a lost letter from the great Victorian poet, R.H. Ash, to another famous poet of the day, Christabel LaMotte. As he is an Ash scholar, Roland takes the letter to a LaMotte scholar named Maude Bailey, and together they begin a search to uncover the relationship between the two. It is a discovery that will have repercussions in the academic world and in their own lives. If you tend to lose yourself in second-hand bookstores, are ravenously curious about the lives of the authors whose works you read, or simply love a great romantic mystery, you will love this book, which won the Booker prize, England's highest literary award.

A.S. Byatt is herself a formidable scholar of literature who left a teaching career at London College in 1983 to write full-time. One day while in the British Museum Library, she spotted a well-known Coleridge scholar. It occurred to Byatt that much of what she knew about the Romantic poet had been filtered through the mind of that scholar. She mused about the effect that such a single-minded pursuit must have on a person. "I thought," she said, "it's almost like a case of demonic possession, and I wondered - has she eaten up his life or has he eaten up hers?" She had an idea to write a book about two famous authors and two scholars who study their lives.

Byatt created two fictional poets, loosely based on Robert Browning and Christina Rosetti, named Randolph Henry Ash, and Christabel LaMotte. The marvel of the novel is that Byatt creates not just the poets, but also their poetry. Calling on her extensive knowledge of Victorian literature, she intersperses the narrative with their poetry, prose, tales, and even literary criticism about the works of these fictional characters. It is, to use an over-taxed phrase, a tour de force. The poems are beautiful in their own right. I confess that my first time through this novel I went to my Norton Anthology of English Literature and looked for R.H. Ash. I was frankly amazed that the author could switch from style to style and write such beautiful verse. The third time through the book, I was struck by the way the poetry also illuminates the narrative.

Roland Michell and Maude Bailey, our two protagonists, feel most uncomfortable in a modern setting and turn to the past for answers. As they connect to the lives of the poets through their letters, they find strength within themselves to live meaningful lives. Byatt's genius for metaphor connects the two couples over and over. Notice the use of color: greens for the feminine and grays and blacks for the masculine characters. Cropper wears Ash's watch, Maude wears LaMotte's brooch. Symbols of confinement and release are paired: the glass coffin and the library cubicle, the green Beetle and the serpent Melusine, the short-lived Eden of Yorkshire and Roland's forbidden garden. As the story builds toward its climax, the images pile up, as it were, until everything and everyone meets in one place, in one very cinematic scene, to uncover the truth. Yet, even with all the romantic drama, Byatt never loses contact with books, with the fact that it is through reading and writing that human beings make contact with their finer selves.

Those who write biography or study history know that every life has a story, but also that we can never tell the story exactly as it was. There is no final truth in history, but only interpretation and recreation. We read the journals of our ancestors and wonder what was not said that would have been most enlightening, as we try to extract a vision of their reality from the clues left to us. Roland and Maude, after years of studying these poets, have a deeply personal regard for them and a desire to protect their privacy. When Roland discovers a correspondence between the poets, he knows that a media sensation will ensue in which every personal detail of their lives will be open to exposure. He resents this, yet is drawn by curiosity about them to investigate further, which eventually causes everything to come to light. In a highly readable series of events, Byatt takes us deeper and deeper into these lives, switching from past to present and back to the past. Finally, after all is revealed, Byatt shares one more crucial detail with the reader that is never revealed to the other characters. It is her way of letting us know at the end that the full story of any other life will always be, to some extent, a mystery.

Rating:
Summary: Love, Mystery and Time
Review: How does one even began to write a halfway objective review of a book with which one has, quite literally, fallen in love? I guess by accepting one of the underlying themes of the novel: that the world we live and love in is a mysterious place and that for all the verbal magic of which we humans are capable (as evinced in this novel!) we fall short of being able to pin down Reality. As Randolph Ash, one of the two Victorian era characters puts it on page 306, "He thought of his hopes and expectations and the absence of language for most of them."
What I find more than a tad disconcerting about almost all the other reviews (with a few greatly appreciated exceptions!) is that the readers want plot, characters, and page-turning reading.-That is, they want diversion and entertainment-Thus they are none-too-suprisingly less than filled with rapture over a book whose fundamental theme, it seems to me, is the nature of the love and language that makes us conscious, sentient human beings.
Yes, there is a plot. But the 20th century characters seem so thin, two-dimensional and untextured in comparison to the Nineteenth century artists on whom they are fixated that this hardly seems to be what this book is all about. What it IS about is the love between Ash and LaMotte and the nature of love in general. The tenuity of the 20th century characters and their relationships seems to be purposeful in order to contrast them with their Nineteenth Century subjects.
"...the life of the past persisting in us, is the business of every thinking man and woman." This is a quote by Ash, in the Nineteenth Century. The only two twentieth century characters who truly make internalizing the past their business are obviously Roland and Maud.
OK. I won't go on to a long dissertation. But I will say that I was amazed that none of the editorial or customer reviews (I read ALL of them) so much as mentioned Proust, the themes of whose work this work most closely parallels. And I will also say to those few reviewers who seemed to appreciate the deeper implications of this novel, to give Proust a gander. I will also state that for me that the gauntlet the book throws down for the reader is proffered by Ash on p.185 "-the only life I am sure of is the life of the imagination."
But you have to have been enchanted by the magical realm the characters have let flow from their souls into their poetry and letters, filling half or more of the book (which so many of the reviewers admit to have skipped) to appreciate the mystery with which Byatt confronts us: What, after all, is REAL? Is the brief physical relationship between Ash and LaMotte more REAL than their poetry and visionary experiences which fill these pages?
It seems to me you have to have at least asked yourself these questions to understand the choice Roland makes at the end.
To conclude, this book is for those who are truly Romantic and possess a sense of wonder at themselves and the constantly changing universe they inhabit and who ask themselves from time to time "Who am I?" "Where am I?" "What is Love?" To those readers who have that sense of wonder and in whom this novel struck a resounding chord, I recommend Proust as a follow-up. Yes, his Remembrance of Things Past is 3,000 pages long. But you don't have to read all of it at one sitting!

Rating:
Summary: Moving and compelling
Review: One of the most moving books I have read in years. Hard to sink into, but believe me, it's worth the trip. The last page had me in tears. I read parts of it over when I want a spine chilling rush of beautiful literature.

Rating:
Summary: Professors, poets, and legends, oh my!
Review: _Possession_ tells a story within a story. The "outer" story involves two academics who work together in an uneasy partnership to investigate a love affair between the two poets that they respectively study. Roland is an awkward and poverty-stricken grad student who has no job prospects and a girlfriend he is shamefully unable to appreciate; Maud is a standoffish and icy professor who keeps her inner self veiled for reasons of her own. Together they follow the paper trail left by the two poets, and in those letters and poems lie the second story, the story of an acclaimed Romantic poet and his more obscure friend, a reclusive female poet who writes something like Dickinson most of the time. Roland and Maud are trying to be the first to publish their discovery, so they do some impulsive things and create a lot of chaos as they try to keep other professors from scooping them. Woven into all this literary jumble is the tale of the fairy shapeshifter Melusine; the female poet wrote an epic about her, and both the poet and Maud play the role of Melusine, in various ways, in their own lives.

This isn't a light read, by any means. I always say that I have two different moods when it comes to reading. Sometimes I just want to unwind and be entertained; any amusing brain-candy will do. In other moods, I want to be intellectually challenged. This book is for the latter mood.

Rating:
Summary: a worthwhile, but not an easy read
Review: It took me two tries to get rolling on this book, but once inside it zoomed, it is really amazingly layered and complex,a very satisfying read and a story that will stay in your mind long after the book is finished.

Rating:
Summary: I was possessed
Review: What a clever book - not only does Byatt create characters, but for her historical characters she creates a complete oeuvre of work for not one but two poets of the Victorian era. What i really liked about this book is that it makes the reader think about the purposes of scholarship and the interpretation of texts. As a student, i seem to come across so many articles where i think the author did not write it to share something important, just to justify their existence (or tenure).I read this novel as saying some of the characters were the same. As for interpretation of texts - i love the fact that this underlines that we find what we are looking for when we read. (an interesting article about this aspect in this novel can be found at: ... - "Three at one Blow: Using Possession to Introduce Theory by Julia Whitsitt) I thought women's studies suffered especially from this aspect in the book - why does every important female writer *have* to be a lesbian?? ☺

But this is book is not just some intellectual exercise - it is a great story. Two historians come together to chase the trail of an unexpected 'addition' to the writers they study (she studies Christabel LaMotte, a not so famous poet; he studies Randolph Henry Ash, a famous Victorian poet). The story flows seemlessly from the 20th century to the 19th, with wonderful use of letters, diary entries and good old-fashioned story writing. Also included is a great cast of 'supporting characters' - brash American intellectuals (i have come across my fair share of Leonora Sterns) introspective British ones. I must admit that I did skim over some of the passages of poetry by LaMotte and Ash, the two main historical characters, but i found the story engrossing, and the historical aspects very believable. A truly worthwhile read.

Rating:
Summary: Scholarly and Literary Intrigue and Romance
Review: A.S. Byatt's "Possession" has been on my out-of-control to-read list for almost two years. I was fortunate lately that "Possession"'s turn came up and I got the opportunity to read it. "Posession" is a fabulous novel that takes place in two eras (19th and 20th centuries) and deals intensely with relationships - between individuals personally, professionally, romantically, and between cultures over time. The primary storyline has Roland Michell and Maud Bailey, two relatively young Victorian scholars, investigating the possibility of a before-unknown relationship between the poets that they respectively specialize in, Randolph Henry Ash and Christabel LaMotte. The correspondence, diaries, and anecdotes they pore over develop into a second major storyline as Ash and LaMotte become as palpable characters as Michell and Bailey.

In the mid-1980's, Roland Michell is a dissatisfied literary scholar, struggling to find real employment, and wholly consumed by his study of R.H. Ash. He happens upon a letter from Ash to a mysterious woman which could change the face of Ash research. Intrigued by what this discovery could mean to his career, he enlists the help of Maud Bailey, for whom a relationship between LaMotte and Ash could be of similar importance. They are forced by the hostility of the literature profession to keep their findings secret from their colleagues and superiors, and start an obsessive chase all over England and France to piece together the story of Ash and LaMotte. Over time, life begins to imitate scholarship and art, as Roland and Maud find each other in their work.

Byatt does an Anthony Burgess-quality job appropriating the language of mid- to late-Victorian England in the Ash-LaMotte letters, journals, etc. Creating an entire body of supposedly literary poetry (male and female) as well as correspondence and diaries is highly impressive and shows an extraordinary range of knowledge and skill. She does excellent work in keeping the language of the two eras separate, and what is tougher, making the language of literary criticism for the most part accessible to a broad audience.

Not to be gender biased, but it seems one part where Byatt takes a little too much license with the 19th century is in making all of her major Victorian women characters, LaMotte, Blanche Glover, and Sabine de Kercoz, all into hardcore Wollstonecraftian feminists. Especially considering their disparate backgrounds, minor aristocrat, would-be governess, and sheltered French girl, this is kind of hard to take. Maybe this is an acknowledgment of LaMotte's influence on her immediate acquaintances, but it does seem a little farfetched even for the late 19th century.

Overall, "Possession" is truly an enjoyable novel. Byatt's command of styles, genres, languages, and most of all character combine to make a fine work. Casual readers may be put off by the constant shift in time periods, the length of time spent away from the 'main' characters, Roland and Maud, and the constant poetical interruptions. For the committed reader, these facets make the novel challenging and ultimately rewarding.