Possession
School has begun. No time for something long and thoughtful that I haven't written yet(ha ha, you thought you'd escaped) So, in the spirit of the review journal this apparently is, here is my librarything review of A.S. Byatt's Possession
Possession by A.S. Byatt
A crime of passion, you might call it, when Roland Michell, a scholar of the great nineteenth century poet Randolph Henry Ash, steals two pages in the poet’s writing, the draft of a letter he discovers in a long-neglected book. The letter leads him to a possible intended recipient, the lesser known poet Christabel LaMotte, and that poet’s devoted scholar, Maud Bailey. Their present hums with academic espionage and whimpering, frustrated careers, the past is alive with journals, essays, and poetry, such poetry that the reader can’t help but dig in right along with the main characters, appreciating every sacrifice they make along the way.
We meet the poets of the past, and snatch their precious secrets from hidey-holes and graves. Despite our distance from them, Ash and LaMotte are so very real, so fragile and so great, the essence, masculine and feminine, of the nineteenth century. And here is Byatt’s feat. She wrote every stitch of their work herself. Though very much their own persons, these two are meant to be the embodiment of their age, and have as much to say about our idealization of the past figures that we build our knowledge upon as about themselves.
More than a romance, although it can certainly be enjoyed that way, the key to the book’s layered meanings is its title. In Byatt’s new introduction, she explains that the idea of the novel came to her while she was contemplating a literary scholar, wondering if the scholar’s subject possessed the scholar, or the reverse. Of course, both are true, as is every extrapolation thereof we can become dizzy contemplating.
Possession has the dearth and architecture of a 19th century novel. Byatt has a gift for character voice, each point of view unmistakable, every world within world breathing history and charm. Wise, kind, and full of a kind of intimate detail any scholar or bibliophile would appreciate, this is a sensory treasure.
See you all on the other side of September. Feel free to cut to the Greenday song.
Possession by A.S. Byatt
A crime of passion, you might call it, when Roland Michell, a scholar of the great nineteenth century poet Randolph Henry Ash, steals two pages in the poet’s writing, the draft of a letter he discovers in a long-neglected book. The letter leads him to a possible intended recipient, the lesser known poet Christabel LaMotte, and that poet’s devoted scholar, Maud Bailey. Their present hums with academic espionage and whimpering, frustrated careers, the past is alive with journals, essays, and poetry, such poetry that the reader can’t help but dig in right along with the main characters, appreciating every sacrifice they make along the way.
We meet the poets of the past, and snatch their precious secrets from hidey-holes and graves. Despite our distance from them, Ash and LaMotte are so very real, so fragile and so great, the essence, masculine and feminine, of the nineteenth century. And here is Byatt’s feat. She wrote every stitch of their work herself. Though very much their own persons, these two are meant to be the embodiment of their age, and have as much to say about our idealization of the past figures that we build our knowledge upon as about themselves.
More than a romance, although it can certainly be enjoyed that way, the key to the book’s layered meanings is its title. In Byatt’s new introduction, she explains that the idea of the novel came to her while she was contemplating a literary scholar, wondering if the scholar’s subject possessed the scholar, or the reverse. Of course, both are true, as is every extrapolation thereof we can become dizzy contemplating.
Possession has the dearth and architecture of a 19th century novel. Byatt has a gift for character voice, each point of view unmistakable, every world within world breathing history and charm. Wise, kind, and full of a kind of intimate detail any scholar or bibliophile would appreciate, this is a sensory treasure.
See you all on the other side of September. Feel free to cut to the Greenday song.