Possession: A Romance

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Roland secretly takes the letters to further investigate who they were addressed to, something he could get into trouble for as a professional academic. This may seem petty, but I was so swamped by how many and how often they cropped up that I want a list for future reference. Roland saw her black silk skirts, her velvet trains, sweeping compressed between the Fathers of the Church, and heard her firm foot ring on metal among the German poets. I firmly believe that poetry books are not worthy of sharing the same shelf space as works of fiction-- this is a merger of two arts, surely. In what becomes the most charming part of the story, Mitchell and Bailey steal away to a magnificent country house, not far from Lincoln, where LaMotte lived most of her life in seclusion.

Byatt plays with the multiplicitous meanings attached to the word and concept of ‘possession’: material things that have contested ownership, owning and being owned, self-possession, obsession. It’s the sort of work where I’ve felt the need to create an entirely separate daytime persona to feel brave enough and competent enough to get through the day, one that I consider separate from what I would consider myself.

Bailey, who has spent her adult life emotionally untouchable, sees possible future happiness with Michell. As to the poetry that Byatt includes in the book, it is both quite good and interesting in its own right and serves to furnish clues and press the unveiling of the mystery itself. That was when I started to figure out what I was doing because then I tried reading my favorite novel of Arturo Perez-Reverte’s, and similarly, rather than being swept away, all I could see was the melodramatic dialogue and some fucked up coded gender politics that I considered writing an enraged essay about. And it isn't just "narrative greed" that makes it such a compelling page-turner, it's the fact that Roland and company's stories, troubles and triumphs are genuinely moving. He was excited by the ferocious vitality and darting breadth of reference of the work, and secretly, personally, he was rather pleased that all this had been achieved out of so peaceable, so unruffled a private existence.

We live in an age of scientific history- we sift our evidence- we know somewhat about eyewitness accounts and how far it is prudent to entrust ourselves to them. So was "The Tinker's Grace," purporting to be Bunyan's prison musings on Divine Grace, and so was Pedro of Portugal's rapt and bizarre declaration of love, in 1356, for the embalmed corpse of his murdered wife, I? I mean, just to rattle off a few: feminism, post-modernism, living in a post-modern world, deconstructionism, many many issues of religion and spirituality, cultural relativism and archetypes, living in a globalized world, negotiating the self in relationships, the academic life and petty infighting, etc, etc. The stormy conclusion is perhaps overwrought, and the postscript that follows could even be described as corny – but I still put it down with a tear in my eye.The story could have been told without it, but I do think it would have lessened the impact to have had the poems discussed so frequently and never have seen any of them. Through it all emerge two love stories, triangulated differently, the contemporary one oddly moving, and a tale that probes the relationships between poet and poetry (do we need to know a life to understand the text? Between Piccadilly and Putney, where he lived in the basement of a decaying Victorian house, he progressed through his usual states of somnolence, sick juddering wakefulness, and increasing worry about Val. It would, it must, be easy to check in Robinson's diary an occasion on which Ash had breakfasted at 30 Russell Square with a professor of mathematics, a political thinker (Bagehot?