Classic book review: Possession

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.

Byatt has been criticized for breaking the form of the romance and allowing us direct views of the past. We see it in letters, journals, and direct narrative. Literary rules notwithstanding, this running comparison between the lives of the literary detectives and the lives of their authors gives the book its point.

Among the various texts Byatt has given Roland and Maud and the reader to wander in looking for clues are some 1,700 lines of verse. Byatt can imitate Browning's blank verse when she writes under the name of Ash, and Christina Rosseti and Emily Dickinson when she writes under the name of LaMotte. Readers of this novel may find themselves reading poetry, fable, diaries, and letters (sent, unsent, or returned unopened) as if to emphasize the breadth of the marvelous activity we call reading.

Byatt raises a number of questions: Do we really want to know all about our favorite writers? Does biography provide real insights into what we care about most in books? Toward the end of the novel, we read of Roland: ``The pursuit of the letters had distanced him from Ash as they had come closer to Ash's life. In the days of his innocence Roland had been not a hunter but a reader....''

In one of the recovered letters, Ash had written to his wife Ellen about his recent work: "... it is all most violently interesting, dear Ellen, an account of the human mind imagining and inventing a human story to account for the great and beautiful and terrible limiting facts of - existence - ...''

In one of her fairy tales, Christabel says to the reader: "But you must know now, that it turned out as it must turn out, must you not? Such is the power of necessity in tales.''

In the end, Maud and Roland break the mesmerism (one of the possessions explored in the novel) that makes Roland think "partly with precise postmodernist pleasure, and partly with a real element of superstitious dread, that he and Maud were being driven by a plot or fate that seemed, at least possibly, to be not their plot or fate but that of those others'' in Ash's books.

The magic of this book about books springs from the fact that its reader comes to identify with Roland and Maud. This postmodern romance tells us much about why we read romances.

While her earlier novels seemed sometimes swamped by their literary baggage, something in "Possession'' makes the literary hocus-pocus genuinely fascinating, even inspiring.

Shrewd, even cutting in its satire about how literary values become as obsessive as romantic love, in the end, "Possession'' celebrates the variety of ways the books we possess come to possess us as readers.

What reader has not felt shadowed, even haunted by the book he or she is reading at the time? Is it going to be life or art in your life? In helping readers to become self-conscious of just what they do when they read, Byatt has not only written a spellbinding romantic novel, she has helped us understand why as readers we wouldn't have it any other way.

Brilliantly put together, warm, witty and wise, "Possession'' deserves its laurels - it won not only the Booker prize but also the 22,500 ($45,000) Irish Times Aer Lingus award - and more: It deserves readers galore.

Thomas D'Evelyn is a former Monitor book editor.

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