Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

A reader might reasonably wonder, given the range of comments on this novel, whether it is worth reading or not. “Possession” is a favorite novel (or “romance,” as Byatt calls it) of mine, and I’ve just finished reading it for the second time, more than two decades after the first reading, just after it was published. But, to be sure, one has to like this sort of book, so here is a kind of checklist---an odd sort of review, I do realize, but here goes: You’ll enjoy “Possession” if you • Like reading about the Victorians • Enjoy poetry (but see below) • Enjoy satire about academic life • Appreciate meticulous, well-rendered detail • Don’t mind an intricate story that moves between past and present, with stops for (fictional) journal entries and poems You won’t enjoy “Possession” if you • Dislike poetry of any sort • Aren’t much interested in academic wrangles over dusty journals and old letters tied with ribbons • Have no interest in Victorian sexual mores, religious searching, and self-abnegation • Want a story that moves sequentially, in straightforward fashion The novel’s main characters, the 19th century lovers and poets R. H. Ash and Christabel Lamotte, are fictional, as is their “poetry,” all of it invented by A.S. Byatt. The latter is a tour de force---pages and pages of poems, some in the manner of Browning (Ash) and some more like Dickinson (LaMotte). You can slide over this if it’s not to your taste, since the clues to the novel’s mystery can be found in the prose, as well. However, reading even part of it will carry you back into this century. The poets, in a wonderful kind of mirroring, have their 20th century counterparts in two academics, both specialists in the period: Roland Michell and Maud Bailey. The tenderness they begin to feel for one another is almost secondary to the tenderness they feel for Ash and Lamotte and for the words of these poets, which are their legacy. Despite all of the chasing down of literary clues, hidden letters, cryptic journal references, and evocative heirlooms in the novel, “Possession” makes clear that the real possession (and passion) lies in the act of reading. M. Feldman