Possession, A Romance

A.S. Byatt

It seems appropriate to begin my culture-blog with a review of Possession, which won the 1990 Booker Prize.

The plot is simple: Roland Michell, mediocre scholar, stumbles across an earthshaking literary find in the library--two drafts of a letter written by a long-dead, eminent Victorian poet, R.H. Ash, addressed to a woman he'd encountered at a social gathering whose eloquence compelled him. Michell then embarks on an academic search, discovering that this woman is an obscure poet of the same period, Christabel LaMotte. Together with chilly Maud Bailey, brilliant LaMotte scholar, they uncover more obscured information about the two poets that threatens to change the face of literary scholarship. 

What's fascinating about this novel is not its plot, which is relatively straightforward and rather predates some of the more contemporary novels which are structured as thrillers situated half in the current-day and half-in history. But Possession is not in any way a thriller. The most thrilling thing about it is Byatt's lush, Victorian use of language. 

Moreover, the characters are caricatures--intricate caricatures, but nonetheless lifeless. Michell is the classic passive underachiever, while Bailey is an ice queen whose continual source of angst is the inability of society to reconcile her physical beauty and her exemplary mind. The side characters are scholars, mostly, people enamored of the past and of language. Val, Michell's passive aggressive girlfriend, feels keenly her own sense of erasure and lack of self-worth. Her introduction is some of Byatt's most perceptive writing. Her female characters are the most developed, while her male characters remain mostly prone on the page, driven single-mindedly by one or two motivations. 

The title recalls "Romance" not only in the sense that this is a love story, but "Romance" in the generic sense of epic, legendary quests. LaMotte and Ash are enamored of archetypes--their poetry tastes alternately of the Romantic era (I was reminded of Keats' Lamia quite often) as well as American Transcendentalism (LaMotte's style bears heavy resemblences to Dickinson's poetry). 

Most marvelous is Possession's density. LaMotte and Ash are fictional poets, and yet Byatt inhabits their voices delicately, with precise differentiation between their mindsets and writing styles. She has literally pages of their poetry incorporated into her novel, as well as pages from the diaries of Ash's wife and LaMotte's companion. But it belies a significant weakness--in the novel's density, the pace of the story drags, and plot points seem too obvious... we are never surprised by the plot, but by the writing. It is literature to be pried into and savored, packed with nuance and graceful turns of phrase, but that pace may not suit everyone.