“Fiddle-de-dee’s not English.”

Possession: A Romance by AS Byatt
Random House 2002 (first published 1990)
500+ pages

Possession: A Romance is the story of two contemporary scholars, Roland Michell and Maud Bailey, who are researching the lives of two Victorian poets, Randolph Henry Ash and Christabel LaMotte. Roland finds a draft of a letter from Ash to a lady friend and soon learns that Ash might had had an affair with LaMotte, which leads Roland to Maud, a LaMotte scholar.

. . . Okay, it’s actually more exciting than that. Roland and Maud’s story unfolds along with Ash and LaMotte’s story as they go on a literary treasure hunt digging up old letters and we end up reading those letters, and journals, and epic poems, and a lot of other stuff besides. Uh. This description is not going well.

The book was made into a movie in 2002, staring Gwyneth Paltrow and Aaron Eckhart. My library seems fond of acquiring movie tie-in versions of books, hence the cover you see here. I haven’t watched the movie. Does anyone know whether it’s good?

Anyway. Let’s move on to the questions from this Weekly Geeks post.

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Here’s one from Suey:

» My main question for anyone that’s read Possession, and be honest here . . . did you skip the poems? (I did . . . and hopefully there was nothing big and revealing in them!)

Haha! The question made me laugh. I did read most of the poems, actually. Well, “read” might be too strong a word — “skimmed” was more like it. Especially Ash’s poems — I kept feeling like he just wanted to show off how clever he was! I did like some of Christabel LaMotte’s poems, though . . . I can’t remember what it was called, but it was about the woman and her lover and uh, the sea that was about to submerge their city? (It is obvious that I don’t really pay attention to these things!)

What usually happens is this: I am enjoying the story and the narrative and ka-blam! Here comes a six-page poem! A sample of an epic greater than anything ever written before! And yet I have no idea what Ash’s talking about! So I usually set the book down at this point and go off to read something else. I come back, I skim through the whole thing, and sigh in relief when I get back to Roland and Maud. If there were anything revealing in the poems, I wouldn’t know — I was marvelling too much at the language to actually try to understand what the poets were saying!

Julie says she didn’t read the poems either — so you are not alone! ;)

Some questions from Christine:

» How did you like Possession? Any favourite moments? Did you see the ending coming, or not so much? Would you recommend it?

I liked it quite well! I wish it was a bit shorter, though — or the poems were a bit shorter, at least! It was able to tide me through a weekend with distracted parents and noisy kids, which says quite a bit about capturing my attention. I was reading the book at a gathering with some university friends at a beach. They all gave me this amused look and told their kids not to bother me — I am glad I didn’t have to read any of Ash’s poetry to two-year-olds. I have nothing against kids; it was just awkward that I was the only one without one, something I only noticed when the boys were being all manly and setting up the barbecue pit and the girls were busy pacifying their children — goodness, when did we grow up? — and I was left with nothing to do.

I don’t have any particular favourite moment, I guess. It was a library book, and I keep wondering: the next time I find it again on the shelves, which pages would I flip back to?, and I couldn’t think of any. (I have odd ways of rephrasing questions, I guess.) The ending — I did not see it coming at all, if you meant the very last chapter/epilogue with Randolph Ash walking down that country lane. I felt terribly, terribly sorry for Christabel then.

As for recommending it: I would, but with some reservations — you really do need patience to get through the book!

And here are the questions from Joy Renee again (I skipped/combined some of the questions, sorry!):

» How was point-of-view handled? Was there a single POV character or did it alternate among two or more? Was it always clear whose eyes and mind were filtering?

It changed. A lot. It was still mostly third person limited, and it was pretty clear who’s thinking what, but that’s not all. There are pages and pages and pages of poetry, a whole section containing letters being sent back and forth between Randolph Ash and Christabel LaMotte, excerpts from journals, excerpts from books written by (fictional) leading researchers about the (fictional) poets.

To me, the best thing about the whole book is how I keep thinking “Oh, Ash thinks he’s so clever!” and “Is Christabel LaMotte ever happy?” and “Why would anyone want to read such a pretentious autobiography!” when I read the excerpts, like they were real people with distinct writing styles instead of all of them being a creation of AS Byatt. That’s one heck of an accomplishment.

» How was language used to set tone and mood?

The Victorian part was very Victorian. I am no Victorian scholar, but it sounded authentic. The different poets/letter writers/people who kept journals/people who wrote books all sounded distinct from each other. The parts set in the modern day England (around late 1980s, I believe) were lighter and easier to read.

» Was the prose dense or spare? Were sentences generally simple or complex?

It’s a mix of both, depending which part you are reading at the moment.

» What was the central or organizing theme? How does the title relate to the story? Was it fitting?

Possession, I’d say. Possessing someone, possessing stolen letters, possessing trinkets from long-dead authors, possessing the past. A lot of possession going on. That’s the title, after all.

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Possession won the Booker Prize in 1990. It’s also the first book by AS Byatt I’ve read, and I’ll probably read her other works if I come across them. This was also read for the Man Booker Challenge.

Black Swan Green by David Mitchell
Sceptre 2008 (first published 2006)
288 pages

As a part of Weekly Geeks 12, I’ll be posting reviews as answers to questions posted at this earlier post here!

A question from bybee:

» I heard that Black Swan Green is a coming-of-age novel. Is that correct?

Indeed it is! It’s a lot of other things too, but mostly it’s the story of thirteen months of the life of thirteen-year-old Jason Taylor in a small village in the English countryside in 1982. Margaret Thatcher is prime minister, the Falklands War is going on, and Jason struggles with his life: growing up, tolerating an older sister, hiding the fact that he stammers, avoiding bullies, and trying to decipher those strange creatures known as girls.

It also touches other social themes like bullying and divorce and racial prejudice and finding acceptance among your peers and doing the right thing, but yes, it is a coming-of-age novel. (There have been comparisons to Catcher in the Rye. I have no comment on that, because I haven’t read it!)

And questions from Joy Renee:

» How was Point-of-View handled? Was there a single POV character or did it alternate among two or more. Was it always clear whose eyes and mind were filtering?

The book was in the first person, Jason’s point of view. No problems with alternating POVs in this one. I really liked him — he made me cringe and smile and remember how awkward things are when you’re thirteen, and how things that don’t seem to matter much to us now were a matter of life and death then.

» How was language used to set tone and mood?

Jason comes off as sometimes awkward but mostly likeable and he does sound like he’s thirteen. (Some of the observations he make might make you wonder if he really is thirteen, though, even when you know he’s a very smart boy.) The language he uses, the description of his everyday life — what music is playing, what cigarettes the older boys are smoking, what David — sorry, for some reason I keep associating the author’s name with the protagonist Jason is having for breakfast — evokes the time period well. (Well, I wasn’t a teenager in the 80s, but it seems real enough to me.) He stammers, and he does his best to hide it from the other kids, knowing that he’ll be the butt of their jokes if he’s ever found out. Despite that, Jason’s also wry and funny and sharp, and he makes you want to root for him to the end.

David Mitchell has a speech impediment himself. I found this article where he talks about language and register and choosing the right words very interesting!

» Was the prose dense or spare? Were sentences generally simple or complex?

Generally it wasn’t so dense. Sentences were quite simple and easy to follow.

» How was metaphor used? Were associations fresh or did they tend toward cliché? Did they add to your understanding of the theme?

I think David Mitchell is one of those rare authors who could get away with any metaphor he wanted to, cliché or not. Seriously, I’ve only read two books by him, this book and number9dream, and I think I have a crush on him. Eeeh, anyway. I’m no good at these things. Here are a few lines from Jason (who also is secretly a poet):

The sequence of doors we passed made me think of all the rooms of my past and my future. The hospital ward I was born in, classrooms, tents, churches, offices, hotels, museums, nursing homes, the room I’ll die in. (Has it been built yet?) Cars’re rooms. So are woods. Skies’re ceilings. Distance’re walls. Wombs’re rooms made of mothers. Graves’re rooms made of soil.

» What was the central or organizing theme?

Growing up, I guess. Finding out who you are. Pretty much your standard coming-of-age story. :)

» How does the title relate to the story? Was it fitting?

Black Swan Green is the name of the village Jason lives in. The joke is that there are no swans in the village, black or otherwise. The whole book is set in Black Swan Green.

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Black Swan Green was longlisted for the Man Booker Prize in 2007. This is also my fourth book for the Man Booker Challenge!

The Blind Assassin by Margaret Atwood
Alfred A Knopf (2001) (First published 2000)
540 pages

I have no idea what to say about this book. Perhaps literary fiction is just not my thing. I enjoyed reading it, though I was never really compelled to read on past my bedtime, and I liked finding the twists and turns to the plot, and how the stories within stories within stories were told in the book. I liked how the stories were slowly woven together at the end. I was impressed that Margaret Atwood managed to pull it off and have it all make sense. I really liked the way she repeated some passages to tie things together. And I love it when there are twists up to the end and you figure it out just before the author spells it out — I think that’s how it should be done. Enough clues to let the reader figure it out, but enough obfuscating to make it exciting, unlike some other books that I will grouse about later.

But! But. I found the story to move oh-so-slowly, and I found myself reading it at the same snail’s pace, despite how much I liked the way Atwood uses the language. This is the first library book I had to renew because I couldn’t finish it on time. The novel centres on Iris Chase, whose sister Laura commits suicide at the end of World War II, as Iris, now an old woman, recounts the tale of her life. Interwoven between Iris’s narrative are newspaper clippings and The Blind Assassin, Laura’s novel which was published posthumously.

For some reason the edition I read had some problems with the typeset — some “W”s came out as “fi”s and “fi”s as “W”s. It was distracting when one of your characters is suddenly called “finifred” and someone else is “Wghting” something. Hopefully that will get, or has been, fixed in later editions!

This book was also read for the Man Booker Challenge hosted by Dewey. This book wasn’t even on my original list; I suspect very few of the books on the original list will end up being read for that challenge. Actually, out of Margaret Atwood’s books, The Handmaid’s Tale has been recommended to me more often than this title, but I can’t seem to find a copy of The Handmaid’s Tale anywhere. I probably should poke the library and get it to add it to its collection.