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.

The Blind Assassin

  
The Blind Assassin
by Margaret Atwood
read: 2013
Time 100 Novels, Guardian 1000 Novels, Man Booker Prize, Orange Prize

In The Blind Assassin, Margaret Atwood deals with the written word itself, by embedding a story within the story - the title The Blind Assassin refers to a novel-within-the-novel written by the narrator's sister Laura. And within that story, the unnamed male creates stories of his own, crafting pulp and genre tales for the amusement of his lover (presumably Laura in a roman a clef). The novel is partially about storytelling, and how fiction can shape reality.

History is fluid, as Iris, the narrator, notes: "[I]s what I remember the same thing as what actually happened? It is now; I am the only survivor." As a youth, Laura is struck by a passage in The Bible where God himself lies, giving false prophecies. Ultimately, the novel-within-the-novel The Blind Assassin is a lie, written by Iris but published under Laura's name, but that lie becomes part of the fabric of reality, as Laura is adored in death, and symbolically misquoted in graffiti in bathroom stalls. The novel is cut with newspaper article that tell the story of what happens to Iris and Laura but is misleading or incomplete. Language cannot be trusted.

Iris pens the narrative itself for reasons she doesn't fully understand, and it is unclear whether it will even be read. She sums up the unreliability of language in the following quote:

In the beginning was the word, we once believed. Did God know what a flimsy thing the word might be? How tenuous, how casually erased?

Midnight's Children

Midnight's Children
by Salman Rushdie
read: 2012
Time 100 Novels, Modern Library #90, Guardian 1000 Novels, James Tait Black Memorial Prize, Man Booker Prize

The one word that comes to mind when I think of Midnight's Children is "rich."  The novel is long and suffused with symbolism.  The prose is big and bold, and the narrator has a lot of personality.  The world is an imaginative interpretation of our own, with elements of "magic realism" poking out at the seams.  Themes and symbols appear and are repeated in patterns throughout the novel - religious symbolism, "nose and knees," jewelry, a center part, bodily functions, impotence, parents, etc.  Even though Midnight's Children is a long novel, there's little fat here; the book is intense, page after page.

But how do you analyze a book that gives away all of its secrets?  Saleem, Midnight's Children's narrator and protagonist, is born at the exact instant India acquires its independence, but as if the parallels between his life and that of his country are not obvious enough, Saleem as narrator interrupts the story halfway through to share with the reader four different ways this parallel works.  When Saleem introduces a new parental figure into the story, he explicitly calls it out and notes how it's just another in a long line.  One could write an a long, long book about all the symbols and parallels in here, but Rushdie takes all the work out of it.  But the transparency of the symbolism doesn't make the novel less interesting or less of an intellectual challenge.

The style is very rich and fun, with Saleem writing with a manic energy that gives the impression of a train about to run off the rails.  There's magic and humor and absurdity, but upon finishing Midnight's Children I came to realize that it is fundamentally a pessimistic book.  The story is a tragedy told in a comic style, which distracts you from the progressively more terrible things that are happening.  Is India, despite all its potential, all its fathers and mothers, all its natural beauty and greatness, all its diversity and spirit, ultimately doomed to collapse under the weight of its very worst elements?