Possession

Possession, by A.S. Byatt

An exhilarating novel of wit and romance, at once an intellectual mystery and a triumphant love story. It is the tale of a pair of young scholars researching the lives of two Victorian poets. As they uncover their letters, journals, and poems, and track their movements from London to Yorkshire - from spiritualist seances to the fairy haunted far west of Brittany - what emerges is an extraordinary counterpoint of passions and ideas.

I don't know if you all were present for my hissy fit a few entries back. Let me assure you, that was only a very very small taste of the complaining and bitching I performed on behalf of Possession. This book was like my albatross, hanging around my neck. Here are some words of advice: don't be like me! Don't get suckered in by an interesting description like I did. JUST SAY NO (to Possession).

See, I thought this was going to be exciting, like, a mystery! But with books, and letters for clues, and nobody shoots each other, and everybody involved is long dead, so it's more peaceful-like, which I like, because I enjoy thrillers without action, is that a crime? Because if that's wrong, then I don't want to be right. So I started Possession, thinking, you know, 'Millions of satisfied readers can't be wrong.' WRONG. I hated Possession. I loathed it. I got about 1/4 of the way in, and conveniently "lost" it, so I could take a break from it. This was just not my book. And it's not a bad book! It's not, I swear. It's just, like, the opposite of anything I ever want to read. And I had a clue, right there on the back of the book:

It is the tale of a pair of young scholars researching the lives of two Victorian poets.

...two Victorian poets.

...two Victorian poets.

...two Victorian poets.

...two Victorian poets.

I hate Victorian poetry. This wasn't like, a surprise to me. I mean, I kinda was aware that I wasn't, you know, as they say, "a fan of the Dickinson" (they don't say that), but I can tell you I certainly didn't expect that reading it would feel like torture. Victorian torture. I like poetry that one could read aloud with some measure of rhythm. I do not like ellipses, and dash marks all over my poetry, with like, crap pauses everywhere and nothing rhymes. I'm getting angry just thinking about it. [NB: Actually, if you want a really hilarious take on this type of poetry, you should read Connie Willis' short story, 'The Soul Selects Her Own Society' which is a satirical "essay" on how Dickinson fought off an alien invasion by her 'near-rhymes,' bizarre meter, and 'profligate use of dashes and random capitalizing of letters.' Basically, it takes everything I hate about Victorian poetry and makes fun of it, in a much nicer and smarter way than I myself am about to.]

Like, okay, read this snippet:

I ask myself, did Galileo know
Fear, when he saw the gleaming globes in space,
Like unto mine, whose lens revealed to me --
Not the chill glory of Heaven's Infinite --
But all the swarming, all the seething motes
The basilisks, the armoured cockatrice,
We cannot see, but are in their degrees
Why not? -- to their own apprehension --
I dare not speak it -- why not microcosms
As much as Man, poor man, whose ruffled pride
Carnot abide the Infinite's questioning
From smallest as from greatest?

If you read that and immediately feel like you're breaking out in hives: congratulations! You're allergic to Victorian poetry. I advise that you put Possession down immediately and never think of it again. If you read that and go, "Hey! What fantastic imagery! I want more!": Congratulations, you're an English teacher! Go make some kids miserable with allegories and metaphors and allusions.


So Possession is a book's book. It uses a lot of literary devices in fancy ways, and wraps everything up in layers of, you know, allegories and metaphors and allusions. The Victorian story is told through poems, letters, suicide notes, diaries, and dug-up graves. I'm about to unwrap some SPOILERS, so beware, although honestly, if you read this review and still want to read Possession, it's not like you care what I'm saying anyway.

The Victorian story is an somewhat interesting one (although not my cup of tea) if only it weren't obscured by all the. . . Victorian-ness of the medium. For instance, there is an entirely too-long section which comprises the bulk of letters between the poets, and it's stuff like this:

Have you truly Weighed --what you ask of me? Not the Gracile Accommodation of my Muse to your promptings -- for that wd be resisted to the Death of the Immortal -- which cannot Be -- only Dissipation in Air.

and this:

How shall I answer you? I have been abrupt and ungracious-- from fear of Infirmity of Purpose, and because I am a voice -- a voice that would be still and small - -crying plaintively out of a Whirlwind-- which I may not in Honesty describe to you. I owe you an Explanation -- and yet I Must Not -- and yet I must-- or stand convicted of hideous Ingratitude as well as lesser vices.

But Truly Sir it will not do. The --precious-- letters -- are too much and too little -- and above all and first, I should say, compromising.

What a cold sad word. It is His word -- the World's word -- and her word too, that prude, his Wife. But it entails freedom.

I will expatiate -- on freedom and injustice.

Ugh. Anyway, so that's a problem for me. I can't argue with the effectiveness of it, or with the accuracy of it, because it's well done. Here's the thing: Possession is well written, very well written. Byatt has a lot of balls to keep up in the air, and she does keep them up with a good deal of success. Not only does Byatt write the whole Victorian thing to a T, she also has to deal with the modern (or, well, 1980s) world, which has scholars picking everything apart, which can't have been too much easy to plot and pace and do properly. Everything is like a big spiderweb - pull one thread and you've got connections to five other things going on at once. I didn't pick up on half of them, mostly because I was just trying to keep my head down and get through it without dying, but I did notice that they were there.


Another of my difficulties with the book was caused by the characters. I didn't like any of them. I found no one sympathetic. The Victorian cast is two poets, Randolph Ash and Christabel LaMotte, who have an affair and break it off, but not before somehow causing LaMotte's roommate to commit suicide, and LaMotte to have a baby in tawdry fashion. I didn't like them. I hate it when people in books have affairs, it always makes me hate the couple. And here, there's this weird thing where apparently Ash's wife refused to have sex with him, ever, and I guess maybe it's supposed to make us more sympathetic to his position? I dunno, man, I still think he's a bit of a shit for cheating on her. The whole thing rubbed me wrong.

Then there's the modern parts, which has two main scholars, Roland Mitchell and Maud Bailey (and jeez, Byatt, could you have made your two male characters any harder for me to distinguish between than Roland and Randolph? I could not for the life of me remember which one was which) who mimic, in some ways, the Victorian couple. That is, Randolph leaves his mopey girlfriend to trek off with this other chick. Everyone is sort of slimey and unlikeable in the modern era too, at least for the first, eh . . . 7/8ths of the book. They're all weird and awkward and grating and gross until everyone comes together to rob graves in an odd tonal shift to madcap caper, when everyone suddenly turns fun and amusing and quirky instead. Oh well, at least it leavened the loaf.

I can't speak much on the moods of the book, or its artistry. Unfortunately, as I said above, I was struggling too much just to get through it to be able to appreciate any subtleties. I know that Byatt intended at least some of it to be satirical, and not serious, but for my part, I found the humor to be very dour. I saw the ridiculousness, but I wasn't amused, merely tired. It takes a different person than me to really relish this kind of humor. And possibly, I'm still upset at how difficult it was - like trying to save some kid from drowning only to find out they'd been faking it the whole time. I mean, it's almost enough to make you want to drown them for real, isn't it?

"My friend attacks my friend!
Oh Battle picturesque!
Then I turn Soldier too,
And he turns Satirist!
How martial is this place!
Had I a mighty gun
I think I'd shoot the human race
And then to glory run!"

-E.Dick.

ARRRGH

Plain Kate

Plain Kate, by Erin Bow

Plain Kate lives in a world of superstitions and curses, where a song can heal a wound and a shadow can work deep magic. As the wood-carver's daughter, Kate held a carving knife before a spoon, and her wooden charms are so fine that some even call her "witch-blade" - a dangerous nickname in a town where witches are hunted and burned in the square.

For Kate and her village have fallen on hard times. Kate's father has died, leaving her alone in the world. And a mysterious fog now covers the countryside, ruining crops and spreading fear of hunger and sickness. The townspeople are looking for someone to blame, and their eyes have fallen on Kate.

Enter Linay, a stranger with a proposition: In exchange for her shadow, he'll give Kate the means to escape the town that seems set to burn her, and what's more, he'll grant her heart's wish. It's a chance for her to start over, to find a home, a family, a place to belong. But Kate soon realizes that she can't live shadowless forever - and that Linay's designs are darker than she ever dreamed.

Okay, confession time: I have been reading, I swear, only I am trying to finish all the books I still have going on before starting new ones. This is a spectacularly bad plan for several reasons:

1. I am in the middle of like, five books, so it's going to take me awhile.
2. I am in the middle of these books (and not finished with them) mostly because I don't want to read them. (Warning sign #1).
3. I keep cheating and starting (and sometimes finishing but sometimes not) new books anyway. My bad.

So, here's the thing: I have been trying very hard to read A.S. Byatt's Possession (ironically, this book has taken over my life, but in a really bad way, like the way debt creditors take over your life) but only, not really trying, because I hate it so much, I can barely force myself to crack it.
So I can't read it, and at the same time, can't not read it, so other books have been kinda getting the short straw as a result. Luckily, Plain Kate was like, two hours of nonsense, so it was a very small detour on the Possession takeover of my life.

Verdict: It was okay. I guess part of the problem was the summary I read in the NYT got my hopes up, because it sounded interesting and adventurous, but it was a lot of Kate, wandering around being stubborn, and people beating up on her. She leaves town after a mob comes after her with axes, then falls in with gypsies, ahem, Roamers, then they find out she sold her shadow, so they try to set fire to her, and then she gets "rescued" again by Linay, who then bleeds her periodically so the ghost of his dead sister can live. She takes a lot of abuse, is what I'm saying. So at least part of the issue is that I didn't empathize with her. Mostly I was just irritated by her somewhat hapless meanderings. She sort of goes through the book like a pinball, bouncing against barriers and changing directions only to hit up against something else. She's not at all a "take charge" kind of person, until maybe, maybe at the very end, but I wasn't invested in her at that point, so it was wasted.

I think, looking back, that that was my biggest peeve: honestly, after I finished it, I was like, nothing happened in that book, but really, stuff did happen, only it never felt immediate to me, I never got into the scene. It was as though I was watching the action from behind a dirty dirty window - I could see, but the effort of looking to the other side meant that I couldn't really focus completely on the immediacy of the events.

The book does "pick up" (and again, let me say, stuff happens in the first 4/5ths of the book, but it made no impact, so for me, it was very blah for awhile) at the end, but it's a bit of a jumble. FYI, total SPOILER ALERT.

First Kate's talking cat offers to die for the Cause, and they decide against it, then Linay totally wrecks havoc on this town in the name of vengeance, and then Kate tries to kill him, but he actually just commits suicide, but then his formerly dead sister comes back and then Kate's talking cat dies, and then the sister decides to die, and the cat comes back to life. But then it can't talk anymore! Phew. I will be honest, the only character I cared about was that talking cat. Rule #1: Kill all the people you want, but god forbid you kill a single dog or cat! So I was pleased that the cat lived. But in killing him and then bringing him back, it ruined the sorrow that the death had created. And perhaps Ms. Bow thought to make it a bittersweet reunion because the cat came back, but only as a dumb animal rather than as the friend it used to be, but I was just glad it came back, and cats don't generally talk anyway, so it failed on that level for me.

The setting. . . was okay. It is "clearly" set in Russia (as the dead sister is a rusalka until she comes back to life) but like, the same way that Sleeping Beauty and Rapunzel are set in Europe: barely. I would have liked more flavour to the setting, more infusion of that specific time and place, more because I like reading about things I don't know very much about and learning something new than for any need to have cultural trappings in this type of tale. Although at one point Kate calls her cat a "panther" and I was all, "Did they even have panthers in Russia?" and spent like, twenty minutes on wikipedia looking at leopard habitats.

Plain Kate wasn't terrible, it just doesn't really sock you in the gut. The saddest part for me was the acknowledgments, and let me just say that if you all don't read the acknowledgments and similar in books, you are totally missing out. They're great, sort of like how previews are to movies. Anyway, that's why it was just okay.


P.S. Panthera is a genus that contains tigers, lions, leopards and jaguars. Most people (or possibly just me) think black South American jaguars when they think panthers, but those aren't really a whole separate cat, they're just jaguars, which only live in South and Central America. Panther could also mean black leopard, and leopards are currently only found in like, sub-Saharan Africa and southeast Asia, but they used to be all the way up to Mongolia and Korea parts. Snow leopards also live in Russia a little, mostly in the areas by the Himalayas, although I don't know if those ever get black. Also, they are FUZZY, and don't really make me think of "panther" when I see them. And because panthers are not a separate cat, but are just odd colorations of jaguars and leopards, you can have white panthers, too, although these have not been bred like the black ones have, even though it's harder to live in the wild as a white panther than a black one. The More You Know!