Possession: A Romance

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But it was just possible that Ash's own Vico had marginalia missed even by the indefatigable Cropper. Running in parallel to this story is the story of Roland Mitchell and Maud Bailey, a couple of academics who study the lives of Ash and LaMotte respectively, who come upon a series of clues that tie the poets to one another and eventually reveal the depths of their true relationship. There were parts where the rhythm of it was enough, and parts where I read and re-read a page again and again until I felt I had understood it on many levels. The novel was adapted as a feature film by the same name in 2002, and a serialised radio play that ran from 2011 to 2012 on BBC Radio 4. Or is this perhaps a product of the over-excited brain of a middle-aged and somewhat disparaged poet, when he finds that his ignored, his arcane, his deviously perspicuous meanings, which he thought not meanings, since no one appeared able to understand them, had after all one clear-eyed and amused reader and judge?

major discovery that could rescue his academic career as well as make a big dent in the field of Victorian poetry studies. People keep writing reviews of this book and talking about how it was great except for all the boring poems which they skipped through.Possession is set both in the present day and the Victorian era, contrasting the two time periods, as well as echoing similarities and satirising modern academia and mating rituals. Roland and Maud receive some information from Leonora Stern, Maud's colleague, that there may be further details on what exactly happened to Ash and LaMotte to be found in France.

That is the shit that started me down this path in the first place, that lead me to make choice after choice that I thought was going there, even if it went somewhere different. But it alternates between being too self-consciously clever (all those unique writing styles, with the historical poems hiding clues to secrets of the past as well as triggering ripples in the modern story) and too predictable plotwise, propped up by stereotyped characters and clichéd situations. Ash asks the girl to give LaMotte a message that he has moved on from their relationship and is happy. Her novels include Possession (winner of the Booker Prize 1990), the Frederica Quartet and The Children’s Book, which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize and won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for Fiction.Roland had only recently discovered that the London Library possessed Ash's own copy of Vico's Principj di Scienza Nuova. Welcome to my new online appendage to the Guardian's monthly book club, where I'm hoping to foster debate, gauge opinion and encourage you – the reader! He looked about him: no one was looking: he slipped the letters between the leaves of his own copy of the Oxford Selected Ash, which he was never without.

At first Roland worked with the kind of concentrated curiosity with which he read anything at all by Randolph Ash.Alongside the different voices are various tones: the brash academic comedy of Cropper waving his American cheque book around as he negotiates small English country lanes in his unwieldy Mercedes; the more affectionate humour associated with Leonora Stern and her 80s feminist-theoretical readings; and the sad archivist Beatrice Nest who has been working on an edited edition for the previous twenty-five years and has nothing much to show for it. The novel explores the postmodern concerns of similar novels, which are often categorised as historiographic metafiction, a genre that blends approaches from both historical fiction and metafiction. Every brick breathed fresh air; each had been stripped and drenched with blow-torch and high-speed jet, so that the house lay revealed beneath its original skin. A marvellously layered book and a masterclass in ventriloquism: I don’t think I’ve ever read a book so full of alternative voices, all pulled off so perfectly – from a contemporary 3rd person narrative, to the poetry of two quite different authors, to letters written by three individuals (four if you include a suicide note), and journals penned by two separate women; even a pastiche of academic feminist criticism from the 80s which is hilarious.

A petite, pale woman with gleaming eyes, green like emeralds, crystalline like a dragon’s stare, sits in a carriage oblivious of the bearded gentleman sitting opposite her who memorizes the lines of her features with fascinated absorption. Christabel LaMotte, likewise, is something entirely new; her poems have a dash of Emily-Dickinsonian diction but with French-English, devout Christian, determinedly feminist sensibilities. Something here might be made of your Fairy's legendary rootedness in veritable castles and genuine agricultural reform--one of the queerest aspects of her story, to a modern mind.I have dreamed nightly of your face and walked the streets of my daily life with the rhythms of your writing singing in my silent brain. S. Byatt is a gifted observer, able to discern the exact but minor details that bring whole worlds into being. This novel is likely, for me, like drinking single-malt scotch in the summer: sometimes I do, but I rarely enjoy it. There are little puzzles and clues throughout the entire novel, most of them residing within the poetry sections. I thought, I can't do that because, (A) the Browning scholars might sue for libel, and (B) that left me no room for invention.