Possession by A.S. Byatt

One of my favorite films is The Red Violin, a 1998 Canadian film by director François Girard. The movie opens with the auction of an exquisite violin, before flashing back to the origins of the violin in 17th-century Italy. The remainder of the film alternates between the present-day, in which Samuel L. Jackson plays an appraiser trying to determine the violin's provenance, and various historical vignettes exploring the owners and adventures the violin has endured since its creation. Of course the highlight of the movie is its music, but I also liked the way the plot weaved back and forth, with the present-day mystery slowly revealed through the historical interludes.

I was reminded of this when reading A.S. Byatt's Possession, for which the author was awarded the Booker Prize in 1990. The novel begins with a visit to the Reading Room of the London Library by young scholar Roland Michell, who has come to look at a book once owned by (fictional) Victorian poet Randolph Henry Ash. Ash is the subject of Michell's scholarship, such as it is, and Michell's boss, Professor James Blackadder, as well as Mortimer Cropper, curator of the Stant Collection at a university in New Mexico that houses much of Ash's estate. Michell quickly realizes he is likely the first person to open this book in many years, and finds stuffed inside a number of miscellaneous papers. Of particular interest are a pair of unsent letters addressed to an unknown woman:

Roland was first profoundly shocked by these writings, and then, in his scholarly capacity, thrilled. His mind busied itself automatically with dating and placing this unachieved dialogue with an unidentified woman...He thought he knew Ash fairly well, as well as anyone might know a man whose life seemed to be all in his mind, who lived a quiet and exemplary married life for forty years, whose correspondence was voluminous indeed, but guarded, courteous and not of the most lively. Roland liked that in Randolph Henry Ash. He was excited by the ferocious vitality and darting breadth of reference of the work, and secretly, personally, he was rather pleased that ll this had been achieved out of so peaceable, so unruffled a private existence.

He read the letters again. Had a final draft been posted? Or had the impulse died or been rebuffed? Roland was seized by a strange and uncharacteristic impulse of his own. It was suddenly quite impossible to put these living words back into page 300 of Vico and return them to Safe 5. He looked about him: no one else was looking: he slipped the letters between the leaves of his own copy of the Oxford Selected Ash, which he was never without.

Michell begins tracing the clues in the letters to determine the intended recipient, which he identifies as a more obscure Victorian poet, Christabel LaMotte, leading him to the doorstep of Dr. Maud Bailey, a LaMotte scholar at a university in Lincoln and apparently a distant relative of LaMotte. Together, Ash and Bailey embark on a literary quest to uncover just what connection there was between the 19th-century poets, and what that relationship might mean for the existing scholarship on their lives and works. This quest takes them to the ancestral home of LaMotte, now in the hands of Sir George Bailey and his wife (remote cousins of Maud), who don't look kindly on visitors. Maud and Roland eventually warm their way into the home, and uncover a hidden surfeit of letters between LaMotte and Ash:

The tapes fell away and the linen, many-layered, was turned back. Inside were two parcels, wrapped in oiled silk, and tied with black ribbon. Maud pulled at the ribbon too. The old silk squeaked and slipped. There they were, open letters, two bundles, neat as folded handkerchiefs. Roland did step forward. Maud picked up the top letter on each pile. Miss Christabel LaMotte, Bethany, Mount Ararat Road, Richmond. Surrey. Brown, spidery, decisive, known, the hand. And, much smaller, more violet, Randolph Henry Ash Esqre, 29, Russell Square, London. Roland said, "So he did send it."

Maud said, "It's both sides. It's everything. It was always there...."

In the meantime, Roland's relationship with live-in girlfriend Val is deteriorating, while Maud is keeping him at a cool arm's length. As they begin to uncover the truth of the Ash-LaMotte intrigue, their own relationship will slowly evolve. Despite their best efforts, the various comings and goings of the literary detectives do not go unnoticed. A colleague of Roland's who is also an ex-boyfriend of Maud's grows suspicious of the time they are spending together, and becomes the catalyst by which Blackadder and Cropper, amongst others, join the chase to uncover the riddle:

"I thought some letters were discovered."
"I should doubt that. I've never heard of any connection. Now, what do I know about Christabel LaMotte? There is something."
"Roland Michell discovered something."
Cropper stopped on the Greek Street pavement and caused two Chinese people to stop equally suddenly.
"Something?"
"I don't really know what. Yet. He thinks it's important."
"And James Blackadder?"
"He doesn't seem to know."
"You interest me, Dr Wolff."
"I hope to, Professor."
"Would you care for a cup of coffee?"

This is not a short novel, and it is easy to get bogged down in the mid-section, especially in the passages devoted to Victorian arcana or academic literary criticism. While I hate to ever advise someone to skim parts of a book, I think that is certainly a better course with this book than to simply stop reading out of frustration. The two parallel plots, the relationship between Roland and Maud and their unraveling of the Victorian mystery, are well-developed and nicely resolved, and it is not strictly necessary to struggle through the mud to appreciate the main storylines.

Quite aside from the merits of the work, it is worth contemplating the enormity of the endeavor Byatt set for herself. In addition to the several hundred pages of narrative, Byatt has populated the work with dozens of letters and diary entries written during the Victorian era, passing back and forth between that era and the present-day (like The Red Violin), as well as large sections of faux-Victorian verse ostensibly written by the two poets at the center of the book's mystery:

The Ants toil for no Master
Sufficient to their Need
The daily commerce of the Nest
The storage of their Seed
They meet--and exchange Messages--
But none to none--bows down
They--like God's thoughts--speak each to each--
Without--external--crown.

These poems are works of art in themselves. And within the novel they are integral to shaping the characters of not just the poets, but also the scholars who've dedicated their lives to studying them. Ash and LaMotte's major works are referenced throughout, stirring the reader's interest until they are intermittently revealed in the latter half of the book. The interpretation of the poems changes as the scholars uncover the nature of Ash and LaMotte's relationship. Thus while this can be a difficult novel to read, it was undoubtedly more difficult to write, and there are certainly rewards for those who finish it.