Pam's Book Log

25 April, 2003

If ever I needed a "good parts version" of a book, it's this one. Its pacing is very uneven. The good parts are very, very good, but they're interspersed with some deadly dull material which kills the plot's momentum.

Possession has two intertwining plotlines. One is about a love affair between two (fictional) Victorian poets. The other is about the modern-day (well, 1986, at any rate) scholars who discover and investigate the affair. The Victorian story is (mostly) told in epistolatory fashion, in the form of letters, journals, poems, and scholarly articles, as read by the modern researchers. It's a creative approach, but unfortunately, I didn't find Byatt's epistolatory style to be particularly compelling. Whenever I came across a pseudo-Victorian poem, or an excerpt from the "biography" of one of the poets, I got so bored I almost stopped reading. But, when I was reading about the modern reaserachers, I couldn't put the book down.

The modern-day story is very enjoyable, and makes slogging through the Victorian stuff worthwhile. The two researchers, Roland Michell and Maud Bailey, are likeable, interesting characters. The plot unfolds as a kind of "literary detective story," in which the two scholars collect clues and piece together the true story of the romance between the Victorian poets. The process of doing so has a strong effect on both of them, resulting in personal growth and all that good stuff. Byatt's prose is much more engaging when she's writing from a particular character's point of view, rather than illustrating the character through a letter, or journal, or something like that. Byatt's depiction of scholars and their relationships is spot on.

I guess it didn't help that I found the two Victorian lovers to be very unsympathetic characters. Randolph Henry Ash comes off as a typical (and I don't mean that in a good way) middle-aged guy who cheats on his wife with a younger woman. Christabel LaMotte is selfish and more than a little cruel (and it turns out that she's also cheating on her long-term domestic partner). I think that maybe Byatt realized how unlikeable these two characters are, because in addition to the epistolatory bits, there are a few segments told directly from the viewpoints of some of the Victorian characters. This completely violates the spirit of the epistolatory novel, but they are probably necessary to show the Victorian characters in a better light than their own words do. It's only partly successful; the first and third of these bits did indeed give me more sympathy towards Ash, but they made me dislike LaMotte even more. The second "Victorian viewpoint" section just made me pissed off at the author.

One of the themes of the novel, one that I really appreciated, is the parallel which is drawn between romantic infidelity and academic/intellectual infidelity. Just as Ash and LaMotte's affair was a betrayal of their previous partners, Maud and Roland-- in their joint discovery and investigation of the affair-- "cheat" on their regular collaborators. Of course, doing so isn't as bad as marital infidelity, but it causes a lot more grief, anxiety, and hurt feelings than a non-academic might think, and can involve just as much deception and sneakiness as adultery.

To sum up: good book, even if it does drag in some places. Recommended, but if you feel yourself getting bored, don't feel bad about skimming through the dull bits.