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what matters most? when the lights go off and one's mind drifts and sometimes finds its way home, where does it go? How well can we know one another? Does anything remain?
Among other things, A. S. Byatt's Possession is about those questions. Her subtitle is A Romance, which she explains with an epigraph from Nathaniel Hawthorne, who contends that a romance allows "a certain latitude, both as to fashion and material, which he would not have felt himself entitled to assume, had he professed to aim at a very minute fidelity." Hawthorne says that a tale may count as a romance "in the attempt to connect a bygone time with the very present that is flitting away from us."
Byatt's tale is a romance in that sense, but even more so, it qualifies as such in the sense of ordinary language. In my view, it is the most romantic novel in the English language—the most stirring novel about romantic love, and about the inner recesses of the human heart. Fitting its title, it is also a novel about possession, and of multiple kinds.
Possession begins with a poem, supposedly written in 1861 by one of Byatt's four principal protagonists, a celebrated, fictional poet named Randolph Henry Ash. Drawing on Genesis, it starts:
These things are there. The garden and the tree
The serpent at its roots, the fruit of gold
The woman in the shadow of the boughs
The running water and the grassy space.
They are and were there.
By the book's end, those words—"they are and were there"—come to have a much deeper resonance.
Byatt immediately introduces us to another principal protagonist, Roland Mitchell, a contemporary figure who is researching Ash's work in the London Library. Roland is small and weak; his girlfriend calls him "Mole." In one of Ash's dusty old books, Roland happens upon two curious letters written by Ash. Both are written to a "Dear Madam," and both are evidently discarded drafts. Ash never sent them.
The first begins, "Since our extraordinary conversation I have thought of nothing else." The second adds, "Did you not find it as strange as I did, that we should so immediately understand each other so well?" It continues, "I cannot but feel,...