I apologize for the delay in getting this post out! Sunday totally got away from me and now Monday night has, too. Truthfully, though I’m not entirely sure I have much to say about this section. I went through to see what I bookmarked and I apparently found something interesting on page 364, but reading through it I have no idea what I found to be interesting enough to mark the page. I should really underline things.

So! What is going on in Possession. Well, Roland is still miserable. Maud is still reserved and quiet. They both dream of a white room with nothing in it but a white bed where they can go and be away from the noise and dirt of the world. It sounds silly when you write it out like that and I almost want to make fun of it, but it is touching and passionate when they talk about it. We find out a big secret about Christabel through her cousin Sabine’s journal.

Everyone talks about the letters being their favorite part, and I suppose in terms of literary accomplishment I agree with that. But in terms of juicy excitement, I liked Sabine’s journal even more. It’s scandalous and dramatic, but I agree with Kim in that it’s not shocking. I don’t know that it’s meant to be shocking to the reader, since we know that at the heart of this novel there are two love stories, but instead it is all about how Maud and Roland react and how their world changes because everything they thought they knew was incorrect.

As different as Maud and Roland are in their back story, they are fundamentally the same in the way they hold onto their own “normal.” Maud, after a disastrous relationship, is reserved and unwilling to trust. Roland has been in an unhappy relationship out of a sense of duty and because he can’t imagine life any other way. Neither is capable of shaking their lives up on their own, but maybe they can do it together. I don’t know – we’ll have to see if they get there.

Mindy commented on Kim’s blog that she thinks it is a good thing we’re reading Possession slowly and I have to agree with her. There’s been something leisurely about this readalong that’s given me time to really sit and think about the book. I’m not rushing to the end, but savoring each section slowly throughout the week. It’s been really lovely and while I’m excited to get to the end next week, I also know that I’m going to miss having a story like this to sink my teeth into week after week. It’s good to read things slowly sometimes.

#readbyatt section 1: me | Kim
#readbyatt section 2: me | Kim
#readbyatt section 3: Kim

Now for the next installment of the #readbyatt readalong with Kim at Sophisticated Dorkiness! When we last left our scholars, Maud and Roland, they were both somewhat miserable, but they were on the brink of discovering something great about the two poets they study: Randolph Henry Ash and Christabel LaMotte. They discovered that the two poets not only knew each other, but were possibly in love and probably influencing each other’s work. Juicy stuff for scholarship on Victorian poets that hasn’t changed in eighty years or so.

This section was more primary source than narrative. Chapter 10 is an epic back and forth between RH and Christabel, where they go from platonic letter-writing friends to being scandalously in love. It’s very well-done, though there were parts that were difficult to get through, the payoff is worth it.

There are poems and letters and biographies of the fictional poets that are all interspersed throughout the main narrative featuring Roland and Maud. I mostly enjoy the story when it focuses either on Christabel and RH together or Roland and Maud together. The rest I enjoy less, like the biographies of RH or the sections that focus on other scholars.

I am interested in the way Byatt seems to focus her descriptions of the women on their physical appearance. She spends so much time talking about how large Beatrice Nest, a scholar who studies RH Ash’s wife, is. Take this passage:

If people thought of Beatrice Nest — and not many did, not very often — it was her external presence, not her inner life that engaged their imagination. She was indisputably solid, and nevertheless amorphous, a woman of wide and abundant flesh, sedentary swelling hips, a mass of bosom, above which spread a cheerful-shaped face [...]. (125)

In fact her thoughts about her own sexuality were dominated entirely by her sense of the massive, unacceptable bulk of her breasts. [...] Another woman might have flaunted them, might have carried them proudly before her, moulded grandly about a cleavage. (130)

I don’t know what to make of these passages, honestly. I can’t think of a male character that is described in such detail in connection with their physical appearance, other than the descriptions of Maud’s hair. Which is another passage I’d like to leave here for consideration:

Maud put up her hands to her head, and hesitated between unpinning the brooch and pulling off the whole head-binding. Finally, awkwardly for her, she did both, putting the scarf on the counter, and then unpinning its carefully constructed folds and handing the large black knobby thing to the old woman, who trotted away to hold it up in the dusty light from the window.

Roland looked at Maud. The pale, pale hair in fine braids was wound round and round her head, startling white in this light that took the colour out of things and only caught gleams and glancings. She looked almost shockingly naked, like a denuded window-doll, he first thought, and then, as she turned her supercilious face to him and he saw it changed, simply fragile and even vulnerable. He wanted to loosen the tightness and let the hair go. He felt a kind of sympathetic pain on his own skull-skin, so dragged and ruthlessly hair-pinned was her.s Both put their hands to their temple, as though he was her mirror. (282)

I bring up both of these passages because they seem to uncommonly focus on physical appearance in a way that other portions of the book do not. Since I think that Byatt is doing something very intentional here, I’m going to leave them for now without passing judgment. It was just something I happened to notice.

It’s really too soon for me to have any sort of opinion at all, other than am I enjoying it or not and the answer is yes, I am. But I did find a few more lines and passages that I thought were noteworthy:

A moth’s wing scaly like a coat of mail,
The sharp hooked claws upon the legs of flies -
I saw a new world in this world of ours -
A world of miracle, a world of truth
Monstrous and swarming with unguessed-at life.
- from Swammerdam, by RH Ash (223)

And after that — a rain — of Ash –
Ash the sheltering World-Tree, Ash the deadly Rain
So Dust to Dust and Ash to Ash again –
I see whole bevies of shooting stars — like gold arrows before my darkening eyes — they presage Headache — but before the black – and burning — I have a small light space to say — oh what? I cannot let you burn me up. I cannot. I should go up — not with the orderly peace of my beloved hearth here — with its miniature caverns of delight, its hot temporary jewel-gardens with their palisadoes and promontories — no — I shall go up — like Straw on a Dry Day — a rushing wind — a tremor on the air — a smell of burning — a blown smoke — and a deal of white fine powder that holds its spillikin shape only an infinitesimal moment and then is random specks – oh no I cannot –
- a letter from Christabel to RH (213)

Our next section is Chapters 14-19 for next Monday. I hope to see you there! As I mentioned last week, please be sure to leave the link to your #readbyatt posts and I’ll be sure to include them at the bottom of this post. What did you think of Chapter 10? Do you have a favorite character yet? Were there any quotes that you loved? Hated?

Whenever I think about Possession by AS Byatt, I think about how many people have told me that this book is their favorite. Then I think about all of the times I have cracked the spine and tried to make it my favorite book. That’s why I wanted to do this readalong with Kim, because I have tried to read this book so many times and so many readers I trust can’t be wrong!

And this time, I really felt like I understood why people love this book. The beginning is still difficult to get through. The first 40 pages or so, I was painfully aware that I was reading. I couldn’t get lost in the story without seeing exactly what Byatt was trying to do. It felt forced. Eventually, though, I got caught up in Roland and Maud’s quest to find out if Randolph Henry Ash and Christabel LaMotte were in love.

When I wasn’t struggling with Byatt’s prose and how it sometimes felt forced, I was in awe of it. She has created such a complex narrative here, with fictional poets, who have fictional biographies, and the scholars who are fascinated by them. When it works, it’s amazing. In the first six chapters, we meet Roland, a Randolph Henry Ash scholar who has made an unusual discovery: an unfinished letter that the poet wrote to Christabel LaMotte, a somewhat obscure poet from the same time period revered by feminists for her unusual style and ambiguous tales. He visits a Christabel LaMotte scholar named Maud and the two of them end up discovering something important about their poets. They know that their scholarship is changed forever.

Roland is involved in a long-term dead-end relationship with a failed scholar he met while getting his PhD. The economy is miserable. His apartment is miserable. Roland is, all around, quite miserable. The discovery of this letter is his chance to make something of himself. While Maud doesn’t seem quite so miserable, not yet anyway, the thought that there is a whole element to LaMotte’s life that she doesn’t know about changes her scholarship and excites her, too.

And that’s where we are, sort of on the cusp of things to come. We know this is a romance, so I suspect that Maud and Roland will follow in the footsteps of their Victorian subjects. We ended this with a chapter that focuses mainly on Mortimer Cropper, the rival scholar from the US. I’m not entirely sure where this narrative turn is going and, until this chapter, I didn’t mind the literary asides. I am actually very taken with Christabel LaMotte’s poetry and fairy tales. I did find it difficult to focus on Chapter 6, though. Hopefully it picks up soon!

If you’re participating in your readalong, please leave a link in the comments and I’ll be sure to add it to the end of this post. You can read Kim’s reactions here! What was your favorite part of Possession? Before you started reading, were you as intimidated by it as I was? If so, do you feel a little less intimidated now?