I wrote these ‘Notes and Enthusiasms for a First Reader of A. S. Byatt’s Possession’ for a friend in Oxford, and am sharing them here.
Above all, I envy you. You’re about to read one of the most complex, beautiful works of contemporary British fiction. A.S. Byatt’s Possession won the Booker Prize in 1990 and, as John Mullan recalled years later in a 2009 interview with Byatt (worth a listen), it “shifted our idea of what literary fiction could be” that “books full of layers, of literary pastiche and imitation” could be popular. Without her example, it’s harder to imagine Elizabeth Kostova, Ann Patchett, or other authors of complex novels with antique settings appealing to publishers.
Possession is a complex book, first of all: a literary detective-story that itself requires some interpretive detective-work to grasp and understand. But it offers too much readerly pleasure to feel taxing. As Ellen Ash says of Christabel LaMotte, Byatt offers you “no softly gloved lady-like patting of the reader’s sensibility, but lively imagination, but force and vigour.” I defy you not to fall in love with her language, just as inexorably as the characters in her novel fall in love with each other. Notice motifs like her use of colours, the interplay of light and shadow, the impulse to classify and catalogue. Byatt uses a learned vocabulary, so you may want to consult a dictionary or encyclopedia every few pages, and you’ll never regret it.
But also, be swept up by a story that contains multitudes of feelings, descriptions, and a rich landscape of words. “My books are suffused with the presence of other books,” Byatt has said. And Possession brims with extra-novelistic, documentary genres: letters, diaries, editions, scholarly criticism and historiography, fairy tales, epigraphs, and the pseudo-Victorian poetry of Ash and LaMotte. You’ll marvel that Byatt shifts registers so convincingly. You’ll meditate on the multiple meanings of possession, the varieties of romance, and the interplay between poetry and story.
You read Possession for pleasure, but you also read it over the shoulders of Byatt’s scholars: slowly, methodically, devotedly, theoretically. From the opening pages, this is a story of archives, where “dead letters come to rushing life,” while others languish or are lost. And at the very conclusion, in the coda at the end of the book, you’ll learn that Byatt still exercises her power to surprise your imagination and break your heart.
