Possession

Both reasons that I didn’t like Possession by A. S. Byatt were my fault.  There was nothing wrong with the novel.  In fact, it was excellent, and under different circumstances, it was a novel I probably would have liked.

Reason #1.  Before reading it, I thought it was an intellectual literary mystery/thriller.  In a sense it was, from the inciting moment when Roland discovers the unfinished letter of the Victorian poet Randolph Henry Ash to an unknown woman, who turns out to be Christabel LaMotte.  Each step of the plot leads Roland and Maud, the LaMotte expert, closer to understanding what really happened between their research subjects all those years ago.  However, the proportions turned out to be INTELLECTUAL!! Literary! mystery (thriller).  Actually, there was hardly any thrill at all, whereas the characters all had better vocabularies and an understanding of literary theory than I did.  (The subtitle is “A Romance,” not a RO-mance, but a ro-MANCE, if that makes any sense.) If my expectation of what the book was about had been more on track, I would have been less disappointed that the most ‘thrilling’ thing in the book was a fender bender, and it didn’t even involve the main characters.

Reason #2.  I took a break halfway through.  This completely shot my momentum, and, in truth, my interest in the book.  I was already becoming frustrated with its slow pace, since every single document that Roland and Maud found–poems, letters, journals, literary criticism, and even footnotes–was reprinted in its entirety within the novel.  On one hand, this is pretty cool that you, the reader, get to make the journey of discovery with the characters and that Byatt is so mind-bogglingly versatile as to produce her researchers’ own primary texts; on the other hand, I don’t actually like poetry, and it’s not as if you get the most salient portions of the manuscripts, because you don’t.  You get all fifty pages of them.  By the end of the novel (and I know this wasn’t the right way to read this novel), all I wanted was to know the basic facts about Ash and LaMotte’s relationship, plus whether Roland and Maud would get in trouble and/or get together.  The point of this novel was much larger than that, but I could only find enough energy to care about the surface.

As I said, the fault was with me.  If I had been a more intelligent, less impatient reader, I might have been more delighted by Byatt’s truly artistic achievement.  Under the circumstances, though, this was not a book I much enjoyed.