I did ultimately love this book, but it took me over half its length to warm up to it. I enjoy literate love stories, the mixing of genres, literary allusions and pastiches, and this book provides all of the above. This is a literary mystery as well as a contemporary and a historical romance: two contemporary literary scholars, Roland Michell and Maud Baily, fall for each other as they uncover the romance between the two Victorian poets they study, Randolph Henry Ash and Christabel LaMotte.
I think part of my problem was that Byatt did too well capturing the era's style in her creations of letters and poems by her fictional poets, and I'm no fan of Victorian literature. Much of the poetry, some lengthy, bored me, then I hit a wall about a third of the way through when I reached the chapter of about fifty pages of their correspondence in the style of the era. It was just too tedious reading these characters going into raptures over each other's poetry, and after reading a few letters, I skipped the rest of that chapter, and then started skipping the poems that began the chapters. The book is also studded with diary entries, portions of Mortimer Cropper's biography of Ash, and articles of literary criticism. It's all technically impressive, but for me the poems and letters dragged down the narrative. (And yes, people who made it through all of the book tell me there are clues about the mystery and character in those poems--some love them. I guess it all depends how you feel about poetry, particularly lengthy Victorian-style poetry.)
And Byatt can count one misfire in her otherwise laudatory ability at capturing voices--Cropper is not a convincing American. (Among other things, his writings include words like "whilst" and "candy floss" an American wouldn't use, and though I could suppose Byatt meant it as an affectation of his, her irritating insistence on describing him in terms of American stereotypes--gunslinger more than once--tends to belie that. Her other American character, Leonora Stern, was more successful.)
Much of the first 300 pages of the book were a grind, but then after that it became for me more and more of a page-turner, and I stayed up all night to read those last hundred pages. I liked how the tales of past and present intertwined, and I grew to love the characters, the way the many meanings of possession figure in the plot in thought-provoking ways, the lovely prose, and ultimately I got caught up in the interplay of ideas and how they fit into the romances.
So if you find yourself wanting to give up (and it crossed my mind at one point), all I can say is I think the book's difficulties are worth pushing through, and if you need to skip that epistolary section or the poems to keep going, I don't think it hurts the narrative to do so--and eventually you may want to go back to those parts. I found the concluding pages moving and the post-script was a lovely grace note. I could see coming back to this book for rereads someday and finding more each time.
Despite finding aspects and parts of this novel amazing, I can't see giving a full five stars to a book where I slogged through or skipped so much--but what I loved here, I loved. So four it is.
