“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 Book of Lost Things by John Connolly
Atria (2006)
352 pages

Twisted fairy tales: sure, just what I was looking for. World War II background: I seem to be stumbling across a lot of books about WWII lately. A book about books: of course I want to read it. So I did.

The writing is terribly bland. It’s . . . flat. The plot was interesting, the way the myth/fairy tales were twisted were awesome, but the writing! Oh man, the writing. I’m trying to come up with another adjective, and the only one I can up with is still “flat”. I felt no connection at all with any of the characters. David did this. David did that. David is angry with his father. I don’t know. I read on because I wanted to get to the end, and also because the book came so highly recommended by so many sources. Also, it was the book not chosen by the bookclub that doesn’t exist for the month of May. (Oh man, I still need to go along and apologise for the lateness of the not-June book discussion. Which will probably be the not-June and not-July book as well. Drat.)

Anyway. The Book of Lost Things. The book is about David, a twelve-year-old boy living in England during WWII. His mother falls ill and dies, and when his father remarries and his stepmother is having a baby, David’s anger and frustration over the whole thing kinda transports him to another world, where fairy tales are twisted and he needs to find the king and the book of lost things the king has to return home. (Or something like that. Go find some other more objective summary elsewhere.)

I liked how dark the fairytale land was, and how the fairy tales were turned on their heads. My copy of the book didn’t have the appendices with the original fairy tales and explanations by Connolly and whatnot, so I am probably missing a lot of things. I don’t particularly care — I’m just glad to escape Connolly’s prose. The ending made me wince. The author seems to be intent on making sure that we know that yes, David’s changed, and yes, he will find happiness but it will be taken away from him sooner or later. Yes, we do understand that. Please be more subtle next time.

This book gave me really odd dreams. It could simply be because I was back at my parents’ house when I was reading it and sleeping in a different bed in a different room, but still, they were really weird dreams about the book. (I was reading Ellen Raskin’s The Westing Game almost concurrently with this book and I didn’t dream about that book.) It wasn’t even scary — it just had the characters of the book traipsing through my dream (no David, though), all of them almost earnestly explaining why they were as they were. Unfortunately, I couldn’t recall the details of their explanations — you know how dreams are. Each dream I woke up from left me even more annoyed than I was before, and as you can see, it didn’t bode well for this commentary.

Considering that this is John Connolly’s most recommended book to date, I think I’ll have to skip the rest of his works. I traded my copy with my sister’s copy of An Abundance of Katherines when I was back at my hometown. I should ask her if she enjoyed it better than I did.

The Giver by Lois Lowry
Houghton Mifflin (1993)
192 pages

This is one of those books that I don’t really have anything much to say about. It seems like everyone has read the book, and most of those who have read it loved it. I liked it a lot, though it won’t make it into any sort of favourite books lists of mine. I especially liked the main character, Jonas.

This book won the Newbery Medal in 1994.

It’s the future, and everything is perfect. No issues, no problems. Family members get together and talk about their feelings, everyone is polite, there’s no hunger or poverty or war, and everything is carefully planned and executed. Everything and everyone is equal, the same, normal. Welcome to the future: utopia has never been this flawed.

Everything starts out very smoothly. Jonas’s community seemed like a very nice place to live in, and I began to wonder what was wrong with this world Lowry has created. After a while, though, the sameness of everything gets a bit disquieting, and when I realised what was missing — colours, memory, music, truth, human emotions — I was rather freaked out by the whole thing. Jonas’s father and the baby that was released was bad enough, but when Jonas’s parents just laugh when he asks whether they love him, it gave me a shudder. Use another word, they say. “Love” is not a precise word, they say: “[it's] a very generalised word, so meaningless it’s become almost obsolete”.

Lovely little place, this utopia. Looks like I’m not moving there after all. Any list about books concerning dystopian fiction should have The Giver in it, that’s what I think.

I like the ending, uncertain as it is. Not only Jonas gets to make his choice and struggle with what comes with it, we get to decide ourselves what happens. It left me thinking long after I closed the book.

I have the other two books by Lois Lowry which are loosely related to The Giver in my reading list: Gathering Blue and Messenger. I think I’ll also pick up Lowry’s Number the Stars one of these days.

I Capture the Castle by Dodie Smith
Virago Press (2003) (First published 1948)
360 pages

“I write this sitting in the kitchen sink”, writes Cassandra Mortmain in her journal, and that’s how this heady mixture of romance and coming-of-age story set in the 1930s Britain begins. Cassandra is an aspiring writer, living in a run-down castle with her sister Rose, along with their brother, stepmother and father. Here’s the catch: they’re so poor that they can’t afford decent meals at times. Cassandra observes: “I have just remarked to Rose that our situation is really rather romantic, two girls in this strange and lonely house. She replied that she saw nothing romantic about being shut up in a crumbling ruin surrounded by a sea of mud.” Cassandra’s father wrote a very successful novel years before and has written nothing since. Cassandra dreams of becoming a writer herself, so she goes around “capturing” her family and her home in her journal. When two American brothers — one of them the heir to the estate which includes the castle where Cassandra’s family is living in — return to England, Rose tries to court one of them as a way out from poverty, with rather hilarious results at times.

The book is a collection of Cassandra journal entries, so all are written in the first person. (Dodie Smith is also the author of The 101 Dalmatians, which I haven’t read.) She probably has the most charming voice I’ve ever come across — she’s witty and wry, precocious and naive at the same time. I love the first two parts — or was it the first one-and-a-half? — and the last part not so much. Cassandra grows up, of course, over the course of the year, and the later parts reflect this. I rather liked Cassandra more when she was happier and more pragmatic.

Her father reminds me of mine, actually. I wanted to march up to him at one point and ask him whether he has bipolar disorder as well — he certainly acts like he does! He’s the eccentric writer all the way — solitary and secretive and takes note of the strangest things, leaving his family wondering whether he really is mad. I liked the characters: Stephen, the servant turned family but mostly still servant who’s desperately in love with Cassandra; Topaz, the stepmother who sometimes wander around nude to commune with nature; the wealthy American brothers; even Rose at her most selfish and, of course, Cassandra herself.

The book came across to me as dreamy and funny and strange. The ending is bittersweet and fitting. If there’s a novel that I’ll remember the first and last sentences, it will be this one — I could still almost see Cassandra scribbling “I love you, I love you, I love you” in the margins of the journal as she runs out of space.

Apparently there’s a film made in 2003 based on the book, hence the cover of the paperback I read. (It was the library’s only copy.) I generally dislike covers for book tie-ins of films; I’d pick up another version if I have a choice. No real reason for this; just me being a snob, I guess. :P

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Also, this book was recced by Nikki for the Herding Cats challenge. This actually means I’ve covered the “read three books” requirement for the challenge, but hey, there’s nothing against going above and beyond requirements, right? Especially when you have a rec list with more than six hundred items on it. XD