Possession

Possession
by A.S. Byatt
read: 2015
Time 100 Novels, Guardian 1000 Novels, Man Booker Prize

Possession is full of layers of metafiction. The text is mostly present-day narrative, but also contains letters, diary entries, and poems. For the most part, we are confined to what the characters in present uncover when investigating the mysteries of the past, but there are a handful of occasions where Byatt introduces a narrative account of the past that cannot be known to the present-day characters.

Roland and many of the other characters are literary scholars and are conscious of how the elements in their lives mirror literary themes. "He was in a Romance, a vulgar and a high Romance simultaneously; a Romance was one of the systems that controlled him," Roland realizes.

The novel is deep enough to invite literary scrutiny, but at the same time it is a comment on the limitations of such scrutiny. Roland thinks he understands Ash, but when he finds Ash's love letters to Christabel he realizes he was missed an aspect of his personality. Similarly, the thrust of the scholarship around Christabel's work assumes lesbian themes, and when it's discovered she had an affair with Ash it changes the interpretations of her work. We are also limited to what is preserved for posterity, as items are never recorded or destroyed. The novel begins with Roland discovering a letter that was never sent, and ends with all the characters opening a letter that was never read.

I feel compelled to mention the final scene. It was uplifting that Ash knew of his child and kept a lock of her hair forever, but that meant that Christabel needlessly carried the guilt of not telling Ash for the rest of her life. The situation was bound to be hopeful in some measure and tragic in some measure, and it is little surprise that the woman suffers more.