I know that there is a movie out there by the same name, but I’m actually talking about the A.S. Byatt novel.

Despite it’s good reviews, I resisted the novel on account of having been young (sixteen or seventeen) when it came out and it also seeming like too much of a ‘chick novel’ (I was more into The Three Musketeers and manly womanizers like Albert Camus).

I can’t even remember where I finally picked up Possession. It was somewhere ’round here and it was used. I think maybe I grabbed it from a box of free books on the sidewalk outside someone’s house. I started it, put it down, and was inspired by an NPR story to pick it back up again, though enough time had passed that I had to start over again.

The ending was necessarily anti-climatic (and the little grave digging bit seemed like a irritating action sequence that was mostly there to sloppily tie up some loose threads) after the breathless archival discoveries and literary sleuthing of the first half, but it was still marvelously put together. The distance from which the characters is interesting, with only Roland Mitchell (who is a sort of hapless hero) getting much interior description of his thoughts.

The dynamic between the characters – specifically the modern day (romantic?) leads and the Victorian (definitely) romantic leads – is interesting. The romance between the Victorian poets is certainly more fiery and more passionate than the tentative one between the contemporary literary scholars, but in each case, the female is the dominant figure in the relationship. In the Victorian case, it is because she is a simply a more powerful figure (the male poet, modeled, I gather, on Robert Browning, writes narrative poetry that deliberately sublimates his own personality into characters and historical figures). In the modern world, it is because the woman is more financially secure and, more importantly, a more prominent and (it is bluntly implied) all around better scholar. I even got the impression that she (I should give her name – the modern scholar is Maud Bailey) likes that he (Roland Mitchell) is passive and her professional inferior.

Good book. Worth reading. Worth reading again. And skip the movie. It’s okay, but only okay. And Roland Mitchell is transformed from hapless (and English) academic hack into a blonde, muscular American who manages to find at least one excuse to take his shirt off (no disrespect intended to Aaron Eckhart, an actor I have liked since the nastily mean-spirited Your Friends and Neighbors).