Sofa Spotlight - Possession, A. S. Byatt

What's it about?

First of all I think that I should say that this book was the winner of the Booker Prize. I've also heard mixed reviews of it in the past. Some people love it (those who decided that it should win the Booker Prize probably did) and some people hate it. There doesn't seem to be much middle ground.

So I feel quite pleased that I finished this book a week earlier than I thought I would, and that I didn't get stuck in it. When I started it I was worried that I would be reading it forever and that I would hate it. But I don't. Nor do I love it. I'm somewhere in the middle.

What is it about? It is about some letters that were written by two Victorian poets that were discovered by accident by two academics. The nature of the letters could mean that all that has been written about the poets will need to be looked at again and possibly rewritten. What the book does is to follow the romance of the Victorian poets as it provides a mirror for the growing relationship between the two academics.

In some ways this book is clever, and the story line gave me enough to want to get to the end and unravel the mystery. And I did enjoy the ending, it resolved both stories and had a good bit of drama to round it all off. It involves a church graveyard in the middle of the night - can you get a more spooky setting?

What was good?

This isn't a light read, but it is worth working through. When I started it I wasn't sure that I was going to like any of the characters, and by the end I still didn't have a favourite, but I was warming up to them. Looking back there was probably one minor character (who is actually a real person so not a character at all) that I liked more than any of the others. She was a cousin (I think) of one of the Victorian poets (Christabel Lamotte) who lived in Brittany and helped her farther welcome Lamotte into their home when she was hiding from Randolph Henry Ash (the other Victorian poet in all this). I liked her (her name is Sabine) because she came close to unraveling the mystery of Lamotte and Ash and it was her that made me want to know what was going on.

What was bad?

One of the worries that I had when I started this book was that it was a novel about poetry. And we all know how I feel about poetry! Most of the time my fears were unfounded, but what I did find hard about this book was that there were chapters that were made up of poetry. Sadly these chapters were lost on me, but I do not doubt that they add something to the novel. Some parts of the book were made up of the letters and journals of the two poets, which I found heavy going to get through. The only journals that I enjoyed reading were those of Sabine, and Ash's wife.

Who is it for?

I suppose the obvious answer is people who enjoy the work of Ash and/or Lamotte. But if you enjoy novels that have two story lines running through it simultaneously this could be one for you.