Title: Possession
Author: Byatt, A S
Published by: Vintage
Year: 1991
First published: Chatto & Windus, 1990
Date reviewed: 06.05
ISBN: 0 09 980040 3

Fifteen years after it won the Booker prize I finally got round to reading this book. It is an impressive achievement: amusing, exciting, and entertaining; complex and mysterious. Intertwined stories are reflected and echoed in each other. It’s a post-modern novel that satirises itself and post-modernism. As I read it, I searched for an apt metaphor for the way the story unfolds: a set of Russian dolls, perhaps, with dark Celtic myths at its heart.

Come, child, and see this wooden doll. Place it here on the windowsill near the glass which shuts out the black night. Hear how the wind blows: there is a storm outside. Bring the lamp close, and see how the doll is reflected in the window and in the yellow light. Look, the doll splits in two: another doll is inside. This doll is called Present, and she encloses Past. Place them together on the sill. What else do you find? Past too splits apart: she encloses Myth. Place them in line, Present, Past and Myth.

Now look into the mirror of the black glass. What do you see? Do you see the reflections of the dolls? And do you see the reflections of their shadows? But the glass is old and uneven: the shapes of the reflected dolls are not as the shapes here on the sill. The reflected shapes and shadows shift and change as we look. Myth grows larger than Past, and Present would seem to fit inside Past. And now there are more dolls reflected in the glass. Reach through the glass, child, reach through, for it is magic glass, washed up from the sea in a dreadful storm. Some say it is from the lost city that sank beneath the waves. I know not if that be true, but on nights such as this when the wind howls and the storm gathers the boundary between this world and the other may be crossed.

And now we are through the glass, you and I, but we are not in the storm. Here is the lamp, and the window, and the dolls, and the storm is outside still. Open the dolls, child, and set them out. Here is Myth fitting inside Past, who in turn rests inside Present. But now there are more dolls. Present will fit inside Author: she writes about Present and Past and Myth. The doll is painted to show her looking over her shoulder. But look now at the painting on the other dolls: Present, Past and Myth each have a picture of Author on them. Author is part of all three. And there is another figure in the paintings: it is another doll, the one Author is looking towards over her shoulder. It is Reader, and again we see Reader both encompasses Author and the other dolls and is part of them.

And there are yet two more dolls, each looking at the next, each enclosing the others, and each being part of the others. One of these two dolls is Critic, but what is the nature of the other, the last doll? Look closely, child. Can you make out the design? It is very complicated now. Ah, I think you have it. Yes, you are right, it is us. We too are dolls in this strange world of reflections which we have entered through the magic glass. Author writes to us as well as to Reader and Critic. She writes about Present Author and Past Author, who in their turn write to Present Critic and Present Reader, Past Critic and Past Reader, and to us. And we? Are we Present, Past or Myth? Are we all three, or perhaps none? Are we the one doll that is outside all the others? Think carefully, child, for if you answer wrongly we shall not pass again through the magic glass, to the world you see reflected there and from whence we came.

Pretentious twaddle – Jacques Derrida

Discuss – Eng. Lit. Examination Paper

Indulgences aside, as you read this book you get drawn into its world, or worlds. Parallels and echoes abound between the characters and their actions in the present day, the 19th century, and mythology. Byatt’s Victorian poets and their works (which are extensively “quoted”) are completely believable: like me you may find yourself fleetingly wondering if you should have heard of Randolph Henry Ash.

I don’t think Byatt invented the myths. Or perhaps all the references I found from a brief trawl on the internet took this book as their authoritative source, and the whole mythology is fiction too. Even though it wouldn’t be hard to find out, I’m sure Byatt’s teasing is deliberate.