Possession: A Romance

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In addition to the new-old poetry, Possession has packed inside it a meditation on the arts of scholarship and biography; the most moving writing about celibacy I've ever come across; a critical work on the erotics of reading; and a half-lament, half-ode to the powers of time and memory and forgetting. 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. It is a book about books, but in such a generous way that nearly everything books can be about is in here. Following a trail of clues from letters and journals, they collaborate to uncover the truth about Ash and LaMotte's relationship, before it is discovered by rival colleagues. All their voices speak to me in symphonic cannon with the unvarying idea that pure love thrives in letting go of the things we want to possess.

The Solitary Thoughts of Alexander Selkirk" was one of those poems, the musings of the castaway sailor on his island. I usually think agree to disagree is bullshit, but when you get into literary experimentation, I think that's the only way to come out alive. Or is this perhaps a product of the over-excited brain of a middle-aged and somewhat disparaged poet, when he finds that his ignored, his arcane, his deviously perspicuous meanings, which he thought not meanings, since no one appeared able to understand them, had after all one clear-eyed and amused reader and judge? and electrical message-network of various desires, ideological beliefs and responses, language-forms and hormones and pheromones.Four stars rather than five as in places I found this a bit cold: I was intellectually engaged throughout, not always emotionally so.

a b Christopher Lehmann-Haupt, Books of The Times; "When There Was Such a Thing as Romantic Love", The New York Times, 25 October 1990. Seldom I have been so obsessed (“possessed”) by a story; I read the last 100 pages in one long session; that says something about the suspense this book offers. Different read as I saw the parallels between the Victorian p,it and the modern plot far more clearly. Most of the poems are clues to the mystery, clues to the characters themselves, especially as they get longer- they're not just there to create an ambiance.Maud and Roland also discover that Mortimer Cropper, a particularly stubborn and selfish academic, intends to dig up Ash's grave as he believes that further letters may have been buried with him. When he left, with his green and tomato boxes heaped on his Selected Ash, they nodded affably from behind the issue desk. It so happens that Mitchell and Bailey are not the only scholars with a vested interest in the Ash-LaMotte story. This letter also reveals that Maud is a direct descendent of LaMotte and will now definitively be the owner of all Ash-LaMotte correspondence.

Critic Christopher Lehmann-Haupt, writing in The New York Times, noted that what he describes as the "wonderfully extravagant novel" is "pointedly subtitled 'A Romance'. The protrusive force behind the story is the thrilling quest for the truth behind the secret relationship between the famous poet Randolph Henri Ash and the rather enigmatic Christabel LaMotte (both fictional characters, but Byatt has recreated their life and writings in every detail); the results of this quest lead – to the astonishment of the literary scientists – to a completely different view on the characters and their art; and let’s be honest, it really is a very romantic story (although with a rather distressing end). We’re currently in the death throes of the postmodern, but it’s amazing she already wrote this in the 90s. The first thing that surprised me about an author I had previously pigeon-holed a dry old stick was how witty she is – and how playful.Ash liked his characters at or over the edge of madness, constructing systems of belief and survival from the fragments of experience available to them. Famous romances include Sense and Sensibility (1811) by Jane Austen and Elizabeth Gaskell's North and South (1854). And as well as the layers of fictional biography, and wondering who is speaking on whose behalf, literal ventriloquism is a recurring theme, there is a seance, and there is even po-mo musing in this po-mo book, when Roland considers “partly with precise postmodernist pleasure, and partly with a real element of superstitious dread, that he and Maud were being driven by a plot or fate that seemed, at least possibly, to be not their plot or fate but that of those others. He would have to show all this new treasure trove to Blackadder, who would be both elated and grumpy, who would anyway be pleased that it was locked away in Safe 5 and not spirited away to Robert Dale Owen University in Harmony City, with so much else. Concluding, "There's real magic behind all the brainy trickery and an emotional journey on top of the academic quest.

For the next half hour Roland worked haphazardly, moving backwards and forwards in the Vico, half-looking for Proserpina, half-reading Ash's notes, which was not easy, since they were written in various languages, in Ash's annotating hand, which was reduced to a minute near-printing, not immediately identifiable as the same as his more generous poetic or letter-writing hand. I know there are plenty of arguments against it, but to me, it summed up my life in the grey zone between reality lived and consumed in fiction. It was a cycle of memory and experience, one feeding off the other to bring me back, make me disappear and make me whole again, here in the present. 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.So the golden apple which Hercules first brought back or gathered from Hesperia must have been grain; and the Gallic Hercules with links of this gold, that issue from his mouth, chains men by the ears: something which will later be discovered as a myth concerning the fields. This brings us to the second layer: beyond the love story and the poetry is a very ironic and good humored critique of the academia in the late 80s, early 90s - the extremely alienating postmodern fad as well as the „cultural/womens/etc“ studies that were developing at the time.