This season’s phenomenon is A. S. Byatt’s “Possession: A Romance,” a long and demanding English novel that concerns the grip with which the past controls the present-specifically the hold that the Victorian era continues to exercise on our contemporary sensibilities. Random House put it out in October, with a modest printing of 9,000 copies. Later that month, “Possession” won England’s prestigious Booker Prize. As of last week, there have been eight printings totaling 77,000 copies of “Possession” in America-an extraordinary quantity for a book of its specific gravity. It perches on best-seller lists and everyone’s best-of-the-year list.
“It hasn’t peaked yet,” says Amy Rhodes, a marketing director at Random House.“Word of mouth is only now beginning to come through. Before Christmas, you couldn’t find anybody who had read it. It’s an intimidating book to contemplate, but not to read.” The Booker Prize helped: even if American readers aren’t familiar with it, booksellers are, and they press the Booker winners on their customers.
Margaret Maupin, who buys new fiction for Denver’s Tattered Cover bookstore, was at first equally cautious: “Oh no,” she said. “This isn’t for everyone. It’s a very literary book. You’d have to be a Victorian scholar to understand it all.” She ordered five copies; by last week she had sold 142.
What makes the novel so attractive? Its plot is easily summarized: two rather arid young English scholars discover a hidden cache of letters implying a totally unsuspected love affair between two Victorian poets. At the very least, the letters demonstrate an epistolary courtship of ideas. What more may have occurred?
One of Byatt’s eminent Victorians, Randolph Henry Ash, is a major poet who, like Browning, wrote dramatic monologues. His verse has a declaiming aspect to it just what you’d expect from a Victorian male. The other, Christabel LaMotte, is a recluse who lived with another woman. Her verse is more “feminine”-short, glancing lines somewhat like Christina Rossetti’s. Christabel was well aware of her ambiguous position as a woman of letters and as a maid sequestered in a tower. She wrote a long poem about the imprisonment of Merlin by the sorceress Vivien. As “Possession” progresses, we watch Ash falling under Christabel’s spell. Byatt isn’t content to quote snatches of “Victorian” poems and letters; she gives us the works. Not three or four love letters, but 50 pages of love letters. Not just snatches of poems, but Ash’s poems running 8 and 10 pages. She gives us two of Christabel’s prose fables in their entirety, and she invents diaries by other writers. It’s exhausting, but it’s all utterly convincing.
Another reason for the book’s success, both Margaret Maupin and Amy Rhodes agree, is its striking jacket, dominated by pre-Raphaelite Edward Burne-Jones’s lush painting of the seduction of Merlin. Beyond that, “Possession” has a compelling plot: her story concludes with her modern characters converging on a midnight grave robbery. With its intricate thematic reflections, “Possession” is as solid and entertaining a novel as has been seen in years.
Photo: This season’s surprise: The good-looking, best-selling novel and its author
Winning both the Booker Prize, Britain’s most prestigious literary award, and the Irish Times-Aer Lingus International Fiction award can do wonders for a writer’s self-esteem. Sure, the $80,000 in prize money is swell, but “the very best thing about them,” says A. S. Byatt, 54, is that they’ve freed her from the shadow of her younger sister’s greater reputation. “I’ve suffered quite badly from being thought of as Margaret Drabble’s sister, and therefore expected to write books like hers, which I don’t do.”
Even Byatt will “now and then” admit that her four earlier novels were “too densely written.“The problem, she says, came from being torn between writing, teaching and motherhood. “Possession” is the first book she wrote without interruption. “That’s why it reads easier. I was actually able to make my own rhythm, hold everything balanced in my head.” And now Byatt can use her new wealth to create the ideal environment for writing another. She’ll build a swimming pool for her second home in France, and refuse, for a year, “to do anything anyone else asks me to do.”
JENNIFER FOOTE in London
