Possession (A.S. Byatt)

Genre: Literary fiction (though with generous snippets of poetry, epistles, and period flashbacks)
Year Published: 1990

Sexual frustration finds its outlet differently in different people. (As for myself, dear readers, I will admit to having once scrubbed my bathtub so vigorously in the immediate aftermath of a late lamented relationship that I nearly gave myself bloody knuckles.) I feel no shame in admitting that about halfway through Possession, I was banging my paperback copy against the nearest solid surface in order to dissipate the secondhand sexual frustration that permeates this entire book.

Possession is about sex, sort of, and love, definitely, and English academics and Britain and feminism and textual study and greed and legalities and shame and desire and letters and memorabilia and memory and Poetry, intentionally Capitalized. Byatt did an enormous amount of work for this book: she invented two Victorian poets (Randolph Henry Ash and Christabel LaMotte), then proceeded to write their letters and poetry in the Victorian style, and to invent academic courses and professors to study the two of them (though many more study Ash, of course, him being the Great Male Poet). The premise of the book is that Ash and LaMotte had an affair that was never known to anyone beyond their immediate circle, and it is discovered by minor Ash scholar Roland Michell in 1986. He shares this discovery with one person, and one person only: Maud Bailey, a LaMotte scholar and a distant relation of same. The two of them echo the Victorian couple in many ways, but in many ways are their own people; while they race other scholars in their "Quest" (again, Capitalized) to determine just what happened between LaMotte and Ash, they are also profoundly changed by what they learn, and in whose company they learn those things.

This book will frustrate you if you choose to read it, I promise you that. It is 555 pages long (and not the teensy mass market pages, but the huge regular edition pages), which means that even if you want to, you cannot plow through this novel. You will want nothing more than to know what becomes of LaMotte and Ash, and what becomes of Michell and Bailey (therein lies, as you may well imagine, the sexual frustration), but because Byatt is a cagey plotter, you will not be awarded until you reach the end.

And the path to the end is a formidable one. Firstly, Byatt knows academia, and for those of us (like myself) who are unfamiliar with deep textual study, there will be a lot of unfamiliar vocabulary and concepts that can't simply be looked up in a dictionary. Secondly, Byatt has incorporated massive amounts of LaMotte and Ash's invented poetry into the manuscript, so that an entire chapter may be an excerpt from an epic poem about a Norse or Roman myth. As evidenced on this very blog, I am a devout reader and writer of poetry; however, when one is swept up in the power of a narrative, a thorny, difficult poem about a fairy is just about the last thing one wants to encounter. Thirdly, Byatt has created a wonderful ensemble cast of characters, each wonderfully drawn, and she utilizes them all, often to the frustration (there's that word again!) of the reader. In the most astonishing display of this tendency, the ostensible villain of the piece, an American scholar, has several pages devoted to his imagined autobiography.

All these stumbling-blocks, though, do reinforce the idea that the reader is in the midst of an epic, a novel that encompasses huge ideas and large swaths of land and time. This book is big in about every way possible, and that has its own attraction.

I should also add that while the frustration (sexual and otherwise) is difficult to swallow, Byatt at least sews up all her loose ends by the completion of the novel. And she does not do it cruelly; she is not ruthless with her characters, whom she seems to love and know very well. There is sorrow within the covers of the book, but the plot is not needlessly tragic. The prospective reader can feel well assured that any time spent reading stanza upon stanza of iambic pentameter will be well worth it.

Recommended? Yes, but as with other epic novels (e.g. The Count of Monte Cristo, Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell), you absolutely must block out time for it. This isn't one that you can do in the "a chapter a night right before bed" style.