“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.

Postcards from No Man’s Land by Aidan Chambers
Definitions (2007) (First published 1999)
334 pages

My initial thoughts, some of which I typed into a text document while I was reading the book: Oh. That’s a surprising start. And I remember wondering: Will there be boys kissing later on? You can just see the good influences of certain online friends creeping into my thought process, XD. The answer, by the way, is “yes”, but it’s more incidental than being something actually important to the plot.

I don’t really know much about the Second World War. The only parts that are really familiar are often the parts where my country is involved, thanks to the (compulsory) Malaysian History subject I took when I was in school. I know the major events, and some of the major battles, but when it comes down to it, I know very little of the whole thing. (It makes me wonder: whatever did I learn during that one year of World History when I was in the Fourth Form? I vaguely remember chapters about the ancient civilizations and the rise of Christianity and Islam and the Renaissance period. Surely it didn’t stop there?)

Postcards from No Man’s Land is partially about World War II. The story begins with Jacob Todd, an English boy in the present-day (1995, I think?) Amsterdam, who’s there to visit the family that had taken care of his grandfather during the Battle of Anhem, and it’s the fifty-first anniversary of the battle. Jacob, travelling alone for the first time, finds himself facing unexpected situations and having to make difficult decisions.

Parallel to his story is the story of Geertrui, the young woman who takes care of Jacob’s grandfather during WWII. The narrative switches between Jacob wandering through the streets of Amsterdam and Geertrui struggling for survival during the war, and the stories eventually come together.

I mostly liked the book. It’s well written, a bit slow at points, but the shifting narratives between Jacob (in third person) and Geertrui (in first person) didn’t bother me, which is a really good thing because the first person POV often gets on my nerves, and the last book with dual narratives — that would be Diana Wynne Jones’s The Merlin Conspiracy — left me gritting my teeth in frustration. The ending is a bit clunky and perhaps a little hasty, but it still works for me. The later parts of Geertrui’s narrative reminded me — very sharply, actually — of Daisy in Meg Rosoff’s How I Live Now: there was something similar in the desperate, we-only-have-this-moment tone in both of the girls’ voices.

I found Jacob’s story more interesting than Geertrui’s. His self-consciousness and shyness and his trying to accept himself is rather endearing. And I rather liked following him around Amsterdam as he discovers the city (and himself) than reading about the hardships of war; besides, he ends up having rather interesting conversations with Daan, Geertrui’s grandson, one of them about art history. Curious stuff.

More than anything else, this is another coming-of-age story — about sexuality and discovering yourself, finding your way, making choices, falling in love. The book also touches on other issues such as euthenasia and fidelity and adultery and bisexuality, and you’re pretty much left to make up your own mind at the end of it.

This book won both the Carnegie Medal (1999) and the Printz Award (2003). Apparently the book is part of a sequence called The Dance Sequence, and this is the fifth book. Other books in the sequence are: Breaktime, Dance on my Grave, Now I Know and The Toll Bridge. The library only has the sixth (and last) book, This Is All: the Pillow Book of Cordelia Kenn, which I’ll probably borrow one of these days. Not any time soon, though. It’s really, really thick! And so many frustrated reviewers. Hm. We’ll see.

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.

The Ruby in the Smoke by Philip Pullman
Laurel Leaf (1988)
230 pages

I found this book on the coffee table at my parents house when I went back for the Christmas/new year break. Apparently my littlest sister found some used books on sale and bought this book and three Christopher Pike books (more on those later).

I loved His Dark Materials. I especially loved Lyra. I gave this book a chance because of the strength of Lyra and Pan and Will and a great deal of good storytelling, and perhaps that was too high a comparison to make, and The Ruby in the Smoke fell short.

This book — and the next two in the Sally Lockheart trilogy — centre on a sixteen-year-old girl named Sally Lockheart in Victorian England. She’s a strong-minded, practical girl, especially in a world where there are expectations on how women are supposed to act. Sally defies these conventions, of course, as she tries to solve the mystery surrounding the death of her father.

It’s a straightforward mystery, most of the time. (I suppose when it’s not, it’s just the opium leaving people high, instead of something really mystical going on.) Sally is a plucky heroine: clear-headed and brave with a good business sense, but most of the time I felt rather distant from her. In fact, I felt detached from the whole story — it didn’t pull me in like His Dark Materials did. (It should be noted that this book was written about ten years before the His Dark Materials trilogy — you can learn a lot in ten years!) The narrative comes off as rather dry at points, and the villains not very villainous. I was rather disappointed with how everything was resolved.

Still! I have high hopes for the next two books. High hopes!

A Wind in the Door by Madeleine L’Engle
SquareFish (2007)
224 pages

Hm. This was one strange book. Maybe I’m just too jaded — my imagination refuses to go with the images and themes this book presents . . . is that the price of growing older?

I read this book very early in January 2008. The details are already vague right now, and I am tempted to just skip this and the next few books. Fortunately (or not so fortunately), I found this entry under the heading 3 Jan in my planner: “A Wind in the Door (ref to Malory?) by M L’Engle” in my messy scrawl, and the following notes: “perhaps too heavy-handed at points? YA lit, SF, likeable characters, slightly ‘out there’ concepts”. :P I guess I meant the mitochondria part. That gave me strange flashbacks to a book by Isaac Asimov I read once upon a time ago — I can’t even remember what it’s called now. I can’t recall anymore which parts struck me as heavy-handed.

The edition I read has a really lovely cover — in the same style as the one for A Wrinkle in Time. Looking at it actually made me recall more of the plot! Like the first book, A Wind in the Door is well written. Despite the whole plot being rather surreal, it’s a good adventure story, with a lot of interesting new characters. I love Meg even more. She’s such a brave girl. I’m surprised I still like Charles Wallace; I tend to dislike precocious children in fiction, especially the really, really, really smart ones, but he’s just so pleasant and trusting and well-meaning. He reminds me of my brother a bit.

I’m not sure if I care enough to read the rest of the quartet. anchan218 says she did like Many Waters, and another friend loves A Swiftly Tilting Planet, so I’ll probably have a go at them if I manage to find a copy at the library.