[The Monitor sometimes republishes material from its archives. This book review originally ran on Nov. 16, 1990.] The winner of England's most prestigious literary prize is Possession by A. S. Byatt. It's a Shakespearean detective story loaded with 1,700 lines of verse – pretty good verse, too.

This improbably buoyant novel combines Shakespearean romance (chaste lovers, guilty passion, children lost and found), detective novel suspense (lost correspondence, visits to scenes of the crime, a coffin disinterred on Halloween), satire on academic fashions (Byatt has a wonderful ear for the idioms of her less than attractive Americans), and a pastiche of styles from Browning to Emily Dickinson.

Until now, Byatt has not been known for her narrative skills. Her four other novels were densely psychological. She has also published short stories and studies of Iris Murdoch and the times of Wordsworth and Coleridge.

Byatt, whose life has been bookish - her sister is novelist Margaret Drabble - retired from university teaching in 1983, lives with her second husband in Putney, southwest London. She has three daughters; she lost a son in an accident and wrote about the loss in what is widely considered her best work of fiction before this, a short story titled ``The July Ghost.'' Byatt says she may use the 20,000 ($40,000) awarded with the Booker Prize to build a swimming pool: Writing is a sedentary occupation, and she loves to swim laps.

"Possession" is about reading. The characters all read the fictitious Victorian poet Randolph Henry Ash. In varying degrees, they have bought into the Ash industry that has grown up in England and as far away as New Mexico. The title "Possession'' refers not only to the romantic plot, but also to the legal problems that arise with the discovery of new manuscripts by the poet.

The manuscripts are letters to a woman, a poet hitherto unconnected to the hitherto unblemished Ash. The finder of the letters is a mild young scholar named Roland. He is just about to give up scholarship for something that pays, as his girlfriend Val has already done. Through his discovery, Roland meets the beautiful, self-possessed Maud (who specializes in the person Ash corresponded with, the poet Christabel LaMotte).

Before the novel is over, everybody interested in either Ash or Christabel - scholars and "poetic trippers" alike - becomes involved in the hunt for missing evidence as to the nature of their relationship. The book surveys contemporary academic styles with fastidious glee.

"Possession" is not just satire; it's mostly romance. Our chaste lovers roam through the beauties of the British landscape and the Breton countryside in France. They don't find many clues about Ash and Christabel, but they do discover much about themselves.

At times, Byatt's novel reads like a mixture of Jackie Collins and Vladimir Nabokov. The steamy stuff happens not between Roland and Maud (as children of the late 20th century, they minimalize everything, including sex) but between Ash and Christabel.

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