Book Review: Possession
Jun. 21st, 2016 12:07 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
osprey_archerI finished reading A. S. Byatt’s Possession, which I enjoyed very much despite the fact that it ended up doing almost all the things I didn’t want it to do. Both couples who I didn’t want to get together got together: Cristabel LaMotte and R. H. Ash run away together for a summer of love on the Yorkshire moors, while Roland and Maud start an affair near the end of the book.
However, Roland and Maud get together almost as an afterthought, which made it much more acceptable: the book didn’t waste lots of page time on it, and didn’t really try to sell it as a Romance for the Ages, which in a way was refreshing. I think they’ll probably have a fling and then realize that they are really better as just friends.
Also, Roland’s former girlfriend Val found a new boyfriend who appreciates her for herself rather than being wracked with dread of her bad moods, so I think in the end everyone ended up better off.
(I did think that Roland getting job offers at all three of the universities he applied to seemed unrealistically wish-fulfillment-y, but this is a minor quibble. And certainly after his terrible years as a dead-end academic he deserved a little wish fulfillment.)
I have much stronger and more complicated feelings about the Victorian thread of the narrative, Cristabel LaMotte and R. H. Ash’s adulterous romance, because in the end everyone involved - or almost everyone; I suppose I must except Blanche Glover - behaves badly, and yet it’s so well-written that I don’t quite condemn any of them, just feel for their suffering and wish they could have handled it better.
Generally speaking I’m not a big fan of adultery plots, and part of the reason I ended up - enjoying is perhaps the wrong word for such a harrowing plot - but satisfied, because it spoke to the censorious Victorian in my soul, because everyone pays through the nose for the adultery.
Including of course poor Blanche Glover, who drowns herself in the river because she thinks she’s been forever abandoned by her lover Cristabel, but then that’s part of the point. Adultery doesn’t just hurt the participants. Its ramifications ripple outward like the waves around a stone thrown into a pond.
I also felt better when it became clear that Cristabel was Blanche’s lover. Even though she doesn’t seem to have adored Blanche quite like Blanche adored her, and was lured away in the end by Ash, at least Blanche’s love was not wholly unrequited. And Cristabel was clearly devastated by Blanche’s suicide. If only Cristabel had told her about the baby! I can see why she didn’t - it must have seemed too big a risk - but if Blanche had known there was a time limit on Cristabel’s disappearance, and that she intended to come back, perhaps Blanche would not have despaired and killed herself in the belief that she was a “superfluous person.”
(The Victorians wrote articles quite openly about the problem of “superfluous women,” that is, women who couldn’t find husbands because there just weren’t enough men available. Just in case the old maids didn’t feel bad enough about themselves already, now there are whole magazine articles lamenting their superfluity.)
I think the decision I found most difficult to accept was Ellen Ash’s decision not to give her husband Cristabel’s final letter, even after she had read his own draft of a letter to Cristabel begging to know what happened to their child. It seems so cruel to deny him that closure on his deathbed - not even to open Cristabel’s letter to see what it says, and relay the basic contents to him if she doesn’t care to give him Cristabel’s whole letter.
And yet I also understand why she doesn’t and can’t quite wholly condemn her. Why should she share the last few weeks of her husband’s life with the woman her husband betrayed her for?
But still, it felt cruel, cruel, cruel, and I was so glad, with almost a physical relief, that the last two pages of the book are a brief snippet where Ash meets his little daughter by chance. He guesses (but can’t be certain) that this is his child and Cristabel’s: he wants Cristabel’s confirmation at the end of his life because he wants to be certain that intuition is correct, not because he is almost certain that the baby died (or even that Cristabel killed it). That’s much more bearable.
In short (and without spoilers), despite having some reservations in the middle I both enjoyed and admired this book: it took the things that I had reservations about and explored them so thoughtfully and with such emotional subtlety that it totally won me over.
Also I just love books where research rather than murder is the impetus for a mystery plot, although they’re hard to find. Other examples include Josephine Tey’s Daughter of Time, Emily Arsenault’s The Broken Teaglass, and Barbara Michaels’ Houses of Stone - I feel like I’m forgetting another book that I’ve read in this vein, but it’s just gone.
Over on![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
evelyn_b’s journal someone recommended Lucy Sussex’s The Scarlet Rider as another example of this genre (what would you call it? Literary/historical research mysteries?), so clearly I should look that up too.
However, Roland and Maud get together almost as an afterthought, which made it much more acceptable: the book didn’t waste lots of page time on it, and didn’t really try to sell it as a Romance for the Ages, which in a way was refreshing. I think they’ll probably have a fling and then realize that they are really better as just friends.
Also, Roland’s former girlfriend Val found a new boyfriend who appreciates her for herself rather than being wracked with dread of her bad moods, so I think in the end everyone ended up better off.
(I did think that Roland getting job offers at all three of the universities he applied to seemed unrealistically wish-fulfillment-y, but this is a minor quibble. And certainly after his terrible years as a dead-end academic he deserved a little wish fulfillment.)
I have much stronger and more complicated feelings about the Victorian thread of the narrative, Cristabel LaMotte and R. H. Ash’s adulterous romance, because in the end everyone involved - or almost everyone; I suppose I must except Blanche Glover - behaves badly, and yet it’s so well-written that I don’t quite condemn any of them, just feel for their suffering and wish they could have handled it better.
Generally speaking I’m not a big fan of adultery plots, and part of the reason I ended up - enjoying is perhaps the wrong word for such a harrowing plot - but satisfied, because it spoke to the censorious Victorian in my soul, because everyone pays through the nose for the adultery.
Including of course poor Blanche Glover, who drowns herself in the river because she thinks she’s been forever abandoned by her lover Cristabel, but then that’s part of the point. Adultery doesn’t just hurt the participants. Its ramifications ripple outward like the waves around a stone thrown into a pond.
I also felt better when it became clear that Cristabel was Blanche’s lover. Even though she doesn’t seem to have adored Blanche quite like Blanche adored her, and was lured away in the end by Ash, at least Blanche’s love was not wholly unrequited. And Cristabel was clearly devastated by Blanche’s suicide. If only Cristabel had told her about the baby! I can see why she didn’t - it must have seemed too big a risk - but if Blanche had known there was a time limit on Cristabel’s disappearance, and that she intended to come back, perhaps Blanche would not have despaired and killed herself in the belief that she was a “superfluous person.”
(The Victorians wrote articles quite openly about the problem of “superfluous women,” that is, women who couldn’t find husbands because there just weren’t enough men available. Just in case the old maids didn’t feel bad enough about themselves already, now there are whole magazine articles lamenting their superfluity.)
I think the decision I found most difficult to accept was Ellen Ash’s decision not to give her husband Cristabel’s final letter, even after she had read his own draft of a letter to Cristabel begging to know what happened to their child. It seems so cruel to deny him that closure on his deathbed - not even to open Cristabel’s letter to see what it says, and relay the basic contents to him if she doesn’t care to give him Cristabel’s whole letter.
And yet I also understand why she doesn’t and can’t quite wholly condemn her. Why should she share the last few weeks of her husband’s life with the woman her husband betrayed her for?
But still, it felt cruel, cruel, cruel, and I was so glad, with almost a physical relief, that the last two pages of the book are a brief snippet where Ash meets his little daughter by chance. He guesses (but can’t be certain) that this is his child and Cristabel’s: he wants Cristabel’s confirmation at the end of his life because he wants to be certain that intuition is correct, not because he is almost certain that the baby died (or even that Cristabel killed it). That’s much more bearable.
In short (and without spoilers), despite having some reservations in the middle I both enjoyed and admired this book: it took the things that I had reservations about and explored them so thoughtfully and with such emotional subtlety that it totally won me over.
Also I just love books where research rather than murder is the impetus for a mystery plot, although they’re hard to find. Other examples include Josephine Tey’s Daughter of Time, Emily Arsenault’s The Broken Teaglass, and Barbara Michaels’ Houses of Stone - I feel like I’m forgetting another book that I’ve read in this vein, but it’s just gone.
Over on
evelyn_b’s journal someone recommended Lucy Sussex’s The Scarlet Rider as another example of this genre (what would you call it? Literary/historical research mysteries?), so clearly I should look that up too.
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no subject
Date: 2016-06-21 01:03 pm (UTC)It reminds me quite a bit of Tom Stoppard's play Arcadia, which hits a lot of very similar points in terms of academia and history, and touches on Romanticism too. Alan Hollinghurst's The Stranger's Child does a lot of this too.
no subject
Date: 2016-06-21 01:36 pm (UTC)The Stranger's Child looks interesting. Maybe I'll check it out.
no subject
Date: 2016-06-21 05:34 pm (UTC)Thanks for the very light peer pressure; I enjoyed this book HUGELY and I might not have gotten around to it for another ten years otherwise.
no subject
Date: 2016-06-21 07:55 pm (UTC)...Although honestly I would have been happier if they had continued their fling with celibacy. They could have luxuriated with their clean white sheets and empty beds and I would have looked on benevolently.
Hooray for Operation Show Val a Good Time! I was concerned that she might pull a Blanche Glover on us, and that would have been very sad. One tragic love polygon was enough for the book.
And I'm glad that Beatrice Nest's years working on that journal finally paid off by giving her the chance to give them all the final clue.
no subject
Date: 2016-06-21 06:45 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2016-06-21 07:51 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2016-07-01 04:00 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2016-07-02 01:05 am (UTC)