An intellectual romance. Review on Possession - A S Byatt

This book was recommended to me by a friend. It's not the sort of thing I usually go for. I'm more your Patricia Cornwell type of a girl, but I do have an intellectual streak and she was so impressed with it, I thought it had to be worth giving a go.

She was right.

It had mystery, it had romance - two romances really, which paralleled each other in a thought-provoking manner, whilst at the same time having you (or at least me) rooting for the protagonists to get together, just like when I'm reading Jilly Cooper (don't be put off if you're not a Jilly Cooper reader, it wasn't Jilly-Cooper-like apart from that).

OK, time for a bit of plot: Roland, a rather ordinary man, an intellectual of the uncharismatic sort, but one who believes in what he does and is kind (i.e. not your typical romatic hero) comes across the draft of a previously unknown letter written to an unknown woman by the great Victorian poet, Ash. Roland's whole life has revolved around researching Ash. The letter intrigues him, and he is determined to find out more. My immediate though was that there wa a love interest for Ash in the air, but Roland does not have the benefit of my knowledge that this story in his life has been subtitled a romance and is not instantly so suspicious.

At this point we begin to meet the other characters and discover why, instead of reporting the find to his department, as would be proper academic behaviour, Roland is determined to find out about this on his own first. His department consists of his boss - a man obsessed with Ash, who would take over the whole project immediately, Fergus Wolfe, a charismatic academic, who is younger than Roland and conceivably less intelligent, but through force of personality has the far better post, some odd woman who researches the diary of Ash's wife Ellen, and has done so for the last fifteen years without yet having got it into a state where it could be published, jealously guarding it from other eyes. Not that his home life is any better. He had a disappointed mother, who always made it clear that she expected better than this from life and that Roland's father had let her down. And at home he has a disappointed and bitter partner, Val, who he has been with since fresher's week, and who since her own dreams went awry through the unexpectedly low mark she got from her degree, has tried unsuccessfully to live vicariuosly through Roland, berating him for his own inability to get ahead.

On with the story. Roland, discovers that the woman Ash wrote that letter to was Chistabel Lamotte and is sent to see Maud Bailey who is the national expert on this woman and also quite a likely heroine for a romance, with her long blonde hair which she hides away from the world since an emotionally damaging affair with Fergus Wolfe.

The plot progresses with the relationship between Roland and Maud growing as more of the relationship between Ash and Lamotte is revealed. The relationships do not progress entirely in parallel, and it makes interesting thinking, wondering whether this is because of the very different personalities of the four lead figures or whether the difference in century and hence expectation. For me, thoughts also arose on the subject of what the passing of time had led to the loss of in relationships, but what the gains were.

In each chapter, more source material is revealed, going further into the relationship of Ash and Lamotte (with evidence very conveniently turning up in chronological order). This includes letters written between the two, a number of diaries, and poems written by the pair. Sometimes we are given a new key to why the poem was written through the letters, changing our interpretation of it and fuelling the book's debate on the question of whether an author's private life is relevant to the study of his works, and also leading to questions about the worth of academic study which goes so grossly astray due to lack of knowledge of the key to various works.

I did enjoy reading the shorter poems and comparing them to the information I had just learnt, but the longer poems were too much for me, and I didn't get enough out of the first two to bother reading the remaining ones. Apparently if you like poetry, the poems have great worth, but I don't, so I wasn't impressed. I think it would have reduced the intensity of the book to have skipped all of them, but I was certainly happier with my non-reading-of-long-poems policy once I started it. Likewise, although I was never bored by the relationship between Roland and Maud, and could not put the book down in the middle of a passage on them, I did occasionally get a bit fed up with the source material on Ash and Christabel, as some of it did not move quite fast enough for my liking. I guess that's what you get for being a product of the instant-gratification generation. Not that any of that was enough to make me wish I hadn't bothered reading the book. I've given it a rating of five stars and I stick by that opinion. I am well aware of the fact that the bits I didn't like related more to my personal taste than the standard of the writing.

Nor had I ever read a book like this before. I recommend it to literature students (who will get a lot out of the examination of literature as an academic subject), historians (for whom the inclusion of original sources, the various possible interpretations of them and the search for further sources will be of interest) and anyone who fancies a damn good read with an intellectual edge to it.

Incidentally, the book had what I would classify as a happy ending, although there was bitterness in the ending as well as joy. (Always an important factor in literature for me)

All in all, I would say it was well worth a read, and satisfing from a large number of angles.

PS It should be noted that I got this book (like most of my books) from the local library, which accounts for some of my answers further down.