lunabee34

Possession by A.S. Byatt

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

At my alma mater, the Honors College presented a book award to a freshman each year. The book was chosen by the professors teaching the Colloquium class and tailored to the student who won. When I won the award, the professors chose to give me this book, beginning a lifelong love of A.S. Byatt and confirming my desire to be an English professor.

I absolutely love the way this story is told in a variety of formats--letters, diaries, poems, short stories, and the POV of multiple characters. Byatt tends to hit a handful of themes in much of her work--transformation, the power of words, the role of women in the academy and in society at large, the spirit world and whether Victorian forays into the supernatural were chicanery (she tends to come down on the side of charlatanism alongside a healthy dose of and yet...)--and these are each treated interestingly here.

What this novel does best, though, is express the absolute joy that scholarship can be--that heady feeling when you realize you've thought of something no one else has noticed, that rush of putting together a puzzle, the visceral pleasure of knowing you are reading material that no one else has read or thought about in years. I remember when I was doing research for my master's thesis, I was looking through bound volumes of Punch from the 1860s (so the actual, physical magazines from that decade), and I found a dated invitation card that had been stuck into the magazine as a bookmark by a person who'd been reading it in the 1860s, and it felt like magic to hold this thing in my hands that an unknown person had held so long ago, and just like Roland, I took that card, and I have it still.

I love the way Maud and Roland's romance mirrors Ash and Christabel's romance, and I love the insinuation that they will be able to avoid the perils that befell their predecessors.

The first few times I read the novel, I assumed that Blanche is romantically in love with Christabel but that Christabel doesn't share her feelings. The novel is explicit about Blanche's jealousy, her anger over Christabel's relationship with Ash, and the lengths she's willing to go to to separate them. Whenever Christabel describes her relationship with Blanche, she makes it sound as if they are two women living platonically and devoting their lives to art, and she doesn't indicate that she's ever felt anything other than friendship for Blanche. This reread, I was struck by Ash's thoughts after he and Christabel make love for the first time: "He stood . . . and puzzled over her. Such delicate skills, such informed desire, and yet a virgin. There were possibilities, of which the most obvious was to him slightly repugnant, and then, when he thought about it with determination, interesting, too. He could never ask." I think the implication is that she and Blanche had a sexual relationship; it's Ash's speculation, but it's his informed speculation, and it changes everything for me. If Christabel is actually cheating on Blanche with Ash (just as he is actually cheating on his wife with her), that changes everything about Christabel's motivation, etc.

Christabel is so smart and so fierce and so independent, and yet it's hard to like her when, as her cousin says, she keeps everyone at bay and makes her life so much harder than it has to be. I feel so sorry for her that she couldn't have that life of solitude and greatness that she wanted, and then I feel even sorrier for her that she loses everything--Blanche, Ash, and her daughter. By the end, she sounds lonely and bitter and full of regret, the witch in her turret as she calls herself.

All those secrets so tightly kept that weren't even secrets at all--Ellen knows all along about Christabel, and Ash knows about his daughter. That ending when you realize that he figures out his daughter lived and meets her and takes a lock of her hair, but that Christabel never knows of his discovery, that she spends the whole rest of her life hurting because she believes she's hurt him by letting him believe his child had died--I cry like a baby every time. And that, too, is a lesson about scholarship, all those things we can never know. Roland and Maud believe the hair is Christabel's, not Maia's, and they'll never know any different, just like I'll never get to know if Ouida did actually have a sexual relationship with Stufa or if her paintings were as abysmal as at least one of her biographers reports.

Absolutely spectacular read. I can't recommend it highly enough.

View all my reviews