'Possession: A Romance' by A.S. Byatt
'Possession: A Romance' by A.S. Byatt
'Outside our small safe place flies Mystery.'—Review #211
Donna and I hope you’re enjoying the holiday weekend! I picked up A.S. Byatt’s ‘Possession: A Romance’ a few weekends ago at Highbury Pub, a sports bar in our neighborhood where a guy named Pete sells books in the old Covid shed on Saturdays and Sundays. I didn’t know anything about this novel, which won the 1990 Booker Prize, but I had a faint memory of someone recommending Byatt (thanks, Jaime!) after I reviewed Iris Murdoch’s ‘The Bell,’ which includes an introduction by her. I didn’t intend to read ‘Possession’ right away, but after I posted a picture of it on social media, people came out of the woodwork to say:
Here’s the cover:
This edition of ‘Possession’ has to be more than 20 years old (it contains no date reference past Byatt’s damehood in 1999) and it must have followed a weird path to the pub at Cortelyou Road and Coney Island Avenue. It appears to have been printed in England, but a price sticker on the back cover is in Swedish krona. Did someone buy it in Stockholm and take it on vacation to the U.S. in the early 2000s? Did they read it in a bar? There’s a watermark on the pages’ edges that’s visible when the book is closed; could it have brushed against condensation on a beer glass on a hot summer day? Did the Swedish tourist leave it behind, sell it or lose it? Where did it go next? I’m dying to ask Pete the book guy:
I love the little mysteries we sometimes find in used books, and I was excited to discover the plot of ‘Possession’ is framed around one. Roland Michell is a young but dull academic who specializes in the life and work of Victorian-era poet Randolph Henry Ash. It’s London in the mid-1980s, and Roland’s romantic and scholastic pursuits are going nowhere. One day, while examining a book once owned by Ash, two letter drafts fall out. They appear to be from the poet to an unnamed woman about how he enjoyed meeting and discussing poetry with her, and about wanting to correspond with and to see her again. Roland understands immediately that the letters are historically and biographically significant—Ash was never linked to any woman beyond his wife. Roland wonders, who is the mystery woman? He looks through some archives and hypothesizes she might be an obscure poet named Christabel LaMotte, who wrote about fairies and mythical creatures. The expert on LaMotte is Maud Bailey, a severe and socially awkward academic who runs a feminist research center at a college way north of London and always keeps her hair covered by a turban or scarf. Roland and Maud go on a quest to confirm the woman’s identify and to learn the truth about her relationship to Ash. Were they having an affair? Were they artistic collaborators? Were they just friends who exchanged letters? And why was their relationship kept secret for more than a century? Did anything dark or sinister happen? Roland and Maud pore over poems, books, letters and other documents (which we also read) searching for clues like they were in a super-intellectual episode of ‘Scooby-Doo’:
It’s a thrilling investigation, complete with a villain: a rich, Mercedes-driving American named Mortimer Cropper who wants to own every scrap of paper connected to Ash for his own museum and intellectual pursuits. Will the heroes unravel the mystery before he does? I don’t want to give anything else away, but I was riveted, like:
This book is a feat of writing. Byatt recreates the Victorian era through dozens of letters and poems (one is below), and intersperses them in the modern narrative while rarely slowing things down or causing confusion. ‘Possession’ also appealed to my well-known love of gossip and drama, and I loved learning all the tea along with Roland and Maud. I also loved how the novel explores various definitions of the word ‘possession,’ from the possession of knowledge (Roland is at first intoxicated by being the only person to know about the letters), the possession of things (Cropper will stop at nothing to acquire Ash ephemera) and love as possession (affairs and relationships have consequences and cause damage, particularly, in this case, to women). There’s also a bit of spectral possession when a seance goes awry, like:
I am so grateful that the universe put ‘Possession’ in my path. It is smart and fun, and I couldn’t put it down. I was surprised to learn that there’s a 2002 film adaptation starring Gwyneth Paltrow and Aaron Eckhart, directed by Neil LaBute, but I’ll probably skip it. I want to possess this book in my memory just as it is. I loved ‘Possession,’ and I highly recommend it.
How it begins:
These things are there. The garden and the tree
The serpent at its root, the fruit of gold
The woman in the shadow of the boughs
The running water and the grassy space.
They are and were there. At the old world’s rim,
In the Hesperidean grove, the fruit
Glowed golden on eternal boughs, and there
The dragon Ladon crisped his jewelled crest
Scraped a gold claw and sharped a silver tooth
And dozed and waited through eternity
Until the tricksy hero Herakles
Came to his dispossession and the theft.Randolph Henry Ash, from
The Garden of Proserpina, 1861The book was thick and black and covered with dust. Its boards were bowed and creaking; it had been maltreated in its own time. Its spine was missing, or rather protruded from amongst the leaves like a bulky marker. It was bandaged about and about with dirty white tape, tied in a neat bow. The librarian handed it to Roland Michell, who was sitting waiting for it in the Reading Room of the London Library. It had been exhumed from Locked Safe no. 5 where it usually stood between Pranks of Priapus and The Grecian Way of Love. It was ten in the morning, one day in September 1986. Roland had the small single table he liked best, behind a square pillar, with the clock over the fireplace nevertheless in full view. To his right was a high sunny window, through which you could see the high green leaves of St. James Square.
The London Library was Roland’s favourite place. It was shabby but civilised, alive with history but inhabited also by living poets and thinkers who could be found squatting on the slotted metal floors of the stacks, or arguing pleasantly at the turning of the stair. Here Carlyle had come, here George Eliot had progressed through the bookshelves. 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. Here Randolph Henry Ash had come, cramming his elastic mind and memory with unconsidered trifles from History and Topography, from the felicitous alphabetical conjunctions of Science and Miscellaneous—Dancing, Deaf and Dumb, Death, Dentistry, Devil and Demonology, Distribution, Dogs, Domestic Servants, Dreams. In his day, works on Evolution had been catalogued under Pre-Adamite Man. Roland had only recently discovered that the London Library possessed Ash’s own copy of Vico’s Principj di Scienza Nuova. Ash’s books were most regrettably scatted across Europe and America. By far the largest single gathering was of course in the Stant Collection at Robert Dale Owen University in New Mexico, where Mortimer Cropper worked on his monumental edition of the Complete Correspondence of Randolph Henry Ash. That was no problem nowadays, books travelled the aether like light and sound. But it was just possible that Ash’s own Vico had marginalia missed even by the indefatigable Cropper. And Roland was looking for sources for Ash’s Garden of Proserpina. And there was a pleasure to be had from reading the sentences Ash had read, touched with his fingers, scanned with his eyes.
My rating:
‘Possession: A Romance’ by A.S. Byatt was published by Chatto & Windus Ltd. in 1990 and by Vintage in 1991. 511 pages. $16.74 at Bookshop.org.
What’s next:
Before you go:
ICYMI: Review #210
Read this: ‘Bad Waitress’ by Becca Schuh in Dirt is a fantastic personal essay and a fascinating glimpse into the restaurant world.
Read this, too: ‘The Untold Tale of the Artichoke Parm, the Most Mysterious Sandwich in Brooklyn’ by Katie Honan in Bon Appétit is an absolutely tremendous story. Do yourself a favor and read it, then come to Brooklyn and get the sandwich. (I’ve had it, thanks to Katie. It’s amazing!)
If you enjoyed this review:
Thanks for reading, and thanks especially to Donna for editing this newsletter!
Until next time,
MPV
Hello from my Irish vacation! Never had any idea of what this book was about, but now I really want to read it! Thanks for putting it in my path! Enjoy your trip!!
Possession is one of my favorite books of all time! I loved reliving it through this newsletter!