Possession

Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

When mild-mannered and unremarkable academic Roland Mitchell stumbles upon a letter written by Victorian poet Randolph Ash to a mysterious woman with whom he seems to be infatuated, he is determined to uncover the truth.

Winner of the 1990 Booker Prize, Possession defies categorization. Rich in symmetry and symbolism, brimming over with myth, poetry and fairy tale, Byatt's masterpiece is part literary detective story, part academic satire and part historical novel. At its heart, however, is a compelling romance that draws the reader into the mirrored worlds of two couples, past and present, and explores the nature of obsession, possession and love.

Excerpt provided by Syndetics

Chapter One 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 T he Garden of Proserpina , 1861 The 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's 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 scattered 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. It was immediately clear that the book had been undisturbed for a very long time, perhaps even since it had been laid to rest. The librarian fetched a checked duster, and wiped away the dust, a black, thick, tenacious Victorian dust, a dust composed of smoke and fog particles accumulated before the Clean Air Acts. Roland undid the bindings. The book sprang apart, like a box, disgorging leaf after leaf of faded paper, blue, cream, grey, covered with rusty writing, the brown scratches of a steel nib. Roland recognised the handwriting with a shock of excitement. They appeared to be notes on Vico, written on the backs of book-bills and letters. The librarian observed that it didn't look as though they had been touched before. Their edges, beyond the pages, were dyed soot-black, giving the impression of the borders of mourning cards. They coincided precisely with their present positions, edge of page and edge of stain. Roland asked if it was in order for him to study these jottings. He gave his credentials; he was part-time research assistant to Professor Blackadder, who had been editing Ash's Complete Works since 1951. The librarian tiptoed away to telephone: whilst he was gone, the dead leaves continued a kind of rustling and shifting, enlivened by their release. Ash had put them there. The librarian came back and said "yes," it was quite in order, as long as Roland was very careful not to disturb the sequence of the interleaved fragments until they had been listed and described. The Librarian would be glad to know of any important discoveries Mr. Michell might make. All this was over by 10:30. 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. At 11:00 he found what he thought was the relevant passage in Vico. Vico had looked for historical fact in the poetic metaphors of myth and legend; this piecing together was his "new science." His Proserpine was the corn, the origin of commerce and community. Randolph Henry Ash's Proserpine had been seen as a Victorian reflection of religious doubt, a meditation on the myths of Resurrection. Lord Leighton had painted her, distraught and floating, a golden figure in a tunnel of darkness. Blackadder had a belief that she represented, for Randolph Ash, a personification of History itself in its early mythical days. (Ash had also written a poem about Gibbon and one about the Venerable Bede, historians of greatly differing kinds. Blackadder had written an article on R. H. Ash and relative historiography.) Roland compared Ash's text with the translation, and copied parts onto an index card. He had two boxes of these, tomato-red and an intense grassy green, with springy plastic hinges that popped in the library silence. Ears of grain were called apples of gold, which must have been the first gold in the world while metallic gold was unknown . . . 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. Hence Hercules remained the Deity to propitiate in order to find treasures, whose god was Dis (identical with Pluto) who carries off Proserpine (another name for Ceres or grain) to the underworld described by the poets, according to whom its first name was Styx, its second the land of the dead, its third the depth of furrows . . . It was of this golden apple that Virgil, most learned in heroic antiquities, made the golden bough Aeneas carries into the Inferno or Underworld. Randolph Henry Ash's Proserpina, "gold-skinned in the gloom," was also "grain-golden." Also "bound with golden links," which might have been jewellery or chains. Roland wrote neat cross-references under the headings of grain, apples, chain, treasure. Folded into the page of Vico on which the passage appeared was a bill for candles on the back of which Ash had written: "The individual appears for an instant, joins the community of thought, modifies it and dies; but the species, that dies not, reaps the fruit of his ephemeral existence." Roland copied this out and made another card, on which he interrogated himself. "Query? Is this a quotation or is it Ash himself? Is Proserpina the Species? A very C19 idea. Or is she the individual? When did he put these papers in here? Are they pre- or post-The Origin of Species? Not conclusive anyway--he cd have been interested in Development generally . . ." That was 11:15. The clock ticked, motes of dust danced in sunlight, Roland meditated on the tiresome and bewitching endlessness of the quest for knowledge. Here he sat, recuperating a dead man's reading, timing his exploration by the library clock and the faint constriction of his belly. (Coffee is not to be had in the London Library.) 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. He was reluctant to tell Blackadder. He enjoyed possessing his knowledge on his own. Proserpina was between pages 288 and 289. Under page 300 lay two folded complete sheets of writing paper. Roland opened these delicately. They were both letters in Ash's flowing hand, both headed with his Great Russell Street address and dated June 21st. No year. Both began "Dear Madam," and both were unsigned. One was considerably shorter than the other. Dear Madam, Since our extraordinary conversation I have thought of nothing else. It has not often been given to me as a poet, it is perhaps not often given to human beings, to find such ready sympathy, such wit and judgment together. I write with a strong sense of the necessity of continuing our intere talk, and without premeditation, under the impression that you were indeed as much struck as I was by our quite extraordinary to ask if it would be possible for me to call on you, perhaps one day next week. I feel, I know with a certainty that cannot be the result of folly or misapprehension, that you and I must speak again. I know you go out in company very little, and was the more fortunate that dear Crabb managed to entice you to his breakfast table. To think that amongst the babble of undergraduate humour and through all Crabb's well-wrought anecdotes, even including the Bust, we were able to say so much, that was significant, simply to each other. I cannot surely be alone in feeling Excerpted from Possession: A Romance by A. S. Byatt All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.

Reviews provided by Syndetics

Library Journal Review

The latest novel by the author of Still Life ( LJ 11/15/85) is as sumptuous as brandy-soaked Christmas fruitcake, dense with intrigue, beguiling characters, and a double-edged romance that bridges Victorian England and modern-day academia. At once literary and highly readable, the book boasts a compelling narrative that exposes the real life behind the art of two Victorian poets, Randolph Henry Ash and Christabel LaMotte, and contrasts their passion for life with that of Maud Bailey and Roland Mitchell, contemporary scholars who stumble upon romance hidden in dusty papers. This wonderfully written work is highly recommended.-- Linda L. Rome, Mentor, Ohio (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

Publishers Weekly Review

The English author of Still Life fuses an ambitious and wholly satisfying work, a nearly perfect novel. Two contemporary scholars, each immersed in the study of one of two Victorian poets, discover evidence of a previously unimagined relationship between their subjects: R. H. Ash and Christabel LaMotte had secretly conducted an extramarital romance. The scholars, ``possessed'' by their dramatic finds, cannot bring themselves to share their materials with the academic community; instead, they covertly explore clues in the poets' writings in order to reconstruct the affair and its enigmatic aftermath. Byatt persuasively interpolates the lovers' correspondence and ``their'' poems; the journal entries and letters of other interested parties; and modern-day scholarly analysis of the period. One of the poets is posthumously dubbed ``the great ventriloquist''; because of Byatt's success in projecting diverse and distinct voices, it is tempting to apply the label to her as well. Merely to do so, however, would ignore even greater skills: her superb and perpetually surprising plotting; her fluid transposition of literary motifs to an infinite number of keys; her amusing and mercifully indirect criticism of current literary theories; and her subtle questioning of the ways readers and writers shape, and are shaped by, literature. (Oct.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

Booklist Review

No one is going to give this book a bad review. Who would want to say anything nasty about this formidably intelligent woman who, in an act of extraordinary bravado, has attempted to refashion the novel in the form of a romance--overlaid, in the manner of a pastiche, with long passages of philosophical verse, symbolist storytelling, and a narrative of detection--about two inhibited academics. In a way, the double narrative (a relationship between nineteenth-century poets foreshadows that between the academics trying to uncover its secret) creates a postmodern novel bent on introspection; its contortions are fascinating. Nonetheless, virtue is not the same as art, and this novel ends up where most English novels come to rest: in the realm of the hollow good. The problem is perhaps that the English no longer have a relationship with their language: they either distrust or revere it. There are exceptions (one thinks, for example of Graham Swift). But contrast just five pages of Byatt's prose with that of Salmon Rushdie or Patrick White (Indian and Australian) and you will see how clearly her work resembles an empty seashell abandoned by the sea. Admirers of John Fowles and Iris Murdoch, on the other hand, will regard this criticism as fallacious. --Stuart Whitwell

Kirkus Book Review

Like a typical Victorian decorator, British novelist and story-writer Byatt (Sugar, 1987; Still Life, 1985) crams into her latest novel enough literary bric-a-brac and furnishings to have a work rich in material but overwhelming in effect. The setting is contemporary Britain, where two academics try to establish the links between Victorian poets Randolph Ash and Christa bel LaMotte (loosely based on Robert Browning and Christina Rossetti). When Roland Mitchell, who has written his dissertation on Randolph Ash, discovers two letters by Ash that hint at a relationship between Ash and LaMotte, he decides to pursue the connection on his own. For one thing, the field of Ash studies is crowded--and dominated as well by the American and immensely well-funded Ash scholar, Mortimer Cropper--and for another Roland's personal and professional life seems at an impasse. He travels up to Lincoln, where the university's women's studies department, headed by Dr. Maud Bailey, has much LaMotte material. Maud, a sometime feminist who is ashamed of her beauty, is a descendant of the LaMotte family, and Roland soon confides in her. The two decide to work together to resolve the mystery. But as they follow the clues they unturn, their fellow academics become suspicious--and envious. At the end, there is a nicely satiric academic version of a climactic police chase, complete with a graveyard stakeout where all is revealed, villainy punished, and true love acknowledged. Uncompromisingly literary and prolix. There are pages of poetry and prose written by Byatt's fictitious characters, and her pace is leisurely and at times ponderous. But within this overabundance are telling sketches of contemporary academic life and a warm sympathy for its men and women. No easy read, then, but worth the effort--especially for those who miss those wonderfully intelligent, if exasperatingly encyclopedic, novels of the past. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.