Categories: uncategorized
Date: 16 July 2005 02:27:30
I've been working through Possession by AS Byatt for a few weeks now. It's a good bit of fun. Everyone probably knows the story, it's a popular book and the movie did okay too I think: there's two literary historians who travel around England in search of clues that the two objects of their study (19thC poets) were having an affair that no-one knows about. As they travel together there is, suprise suprise, lots of sexual and relationship tension. Not that any of that has been resolved in any way so far (I'm 281/509 way through the book).
One thign I like about it is the way the two stories are told. There is the contemporary narrative of the main character Roland and his female counterpart that in some ways mirrors the secret lives they discover of the 19thC poets they are studying. The story of the poets is told wholly through their letters to each other, which take up a substantial part of the centre of the novel. Anyone who has ever sent love letters to someone will recognise these immediately: the uncertainty, the representation, the continuation of previous conversation. The narrative that is formed by the letters is beautiful and interesting because of its highly personal quality.
And did you find - as I did - how curious, as well as very natural, it was that we should be so shy with each other, when in a papery way we knew each other so much better? I feel I have always known you, and yet I search for polite phrases and conventional enquiries - you are more mysterious in your presence (as I suppose most of us may be) than you seem to be in ink and scribbled symbols. (Perhaps we are all so. I cannot tell.)
I am enjoying this book for its escapism quality as much as anything else. I'll write again when I've finished it.