In short, the whole book is a gigantic tease – which is certainly satisfying on an intellectual level" but, "Possession's true centre is a big, red, beating heart. I've also wondered for some time if my anti-AS prejudice was a bit daft and thought I should give her another – fairer – reading. So if I construct a fictive eyewitness account- a credible plausible account- am I lending life to truth with my fiction- or verisimilitude to a colossal Lie with my feverish imagination? He would have to show all this new treasure trove to Blackadder, who would be both elated and grumpy, who would anyway be pleased that it was locked away in Safe 5 and not spirited away to Robert Dale Owen University in Harmony City, with so much else. S. Byatt's short-story collections, so I knew she had a fine control of language, but Possession is on a different plane, telling the story with a multitude of voices through letters, poems, criticism, biography, and journal entries as well as the prose of the main narrative.

That after passion is spent, heartache subdued and disappointments diluted in the sea of memories, that long after the stillborn happiness has burnt out in the arson of irreconcilable pasts, dead words will be rekindled from the ashes with every new reading, Phoenix-like. There's a fascinating fight over spiritual beliefs that I don't have the headspace to deal with now, but is haunting the back of my head, and I expect to be obsessed with it the next time I read it. Ash asks his daughter to pass on a message to LaMotte that he is happy now, but the little girl forgets to do it.

Alongside the different voices are various tones: the brash academic comedy of Cropper waving his American cheque book around as he negotiates small English country lanes in his unwieldy Mercedes; the more affectionate humour associated with Leonora Stern and her 80s feminist-theoretical readings; and the sad archivist Beatrice Nest who has been working on an edited edition for the previous twenty-five years and has nothing much to show for it. In Possession, the characters of LaMotte and Ash are much more mysterious and difficult to analyse, whereas readers get a clear picture of who Roland and Maud are.

a b Christopher Lehmann-Haupt, Books of The Times; "When There Was Such a Thing as Romantic Love", The New York Times, 25 October 1990. These tiles extended halfway up the walls, where they met a paisley vinyl paper crawling with busy suckered globules, octopods, sea-slugs, in very bright purple and pink.An interesting and at least as important theme is that on the female condition and feminism, now and then. The text was taken apart and formed into whatever the accidental school held as its dogma, as it’s ideology. She is an intelligent and multi-talented author, and I was delighted to accompany her through the throes of Randolph Ash and Christabel LaMotte's love story to the last riveting moment.

okay first of all I was wondering what could be interesting in school students studying the life of poets? Byatt's novel follows two academics as they investigate a couple that existed approximately a hundred years previous. This novel is likely, for me, like drinking single-malt scotch in the summer: sometimes I do, but I rarely enjoy it. You can change your choices at any time by visiting Cookie preferences, as described in the Cookie notice.Critic Christopher Lehmann-Haupt, writing in The New York Times, noted that what he describes as the "wonderfully extravagant novel" is "pointedly subtitled 'A Romance'.