The Booker Prize Podcast, Episode 28: Possession by A.S. Byatt

A.S. Byatt’s Possession is a blockbuster of a novel, loved by both critics and readers. If you haven’t already read it, you’ve probably heard of it. (And if you haven’t heard of it, well, we’re here to fill you in.) Possession won the 1990 Booker Prize and it’s a romp of a novel that’s part detective thriller and part romance. It also happens to be the subject of our first Monthly Spotlight of 2024 – formerly known as Book of the Month – so tune in as we delve into the book and the life of its author.

• The Virgin in the Garden by A.S. Byatt
• The Djinn in the Nightingale’s Eye by A.S. Byatt
• The Biographer’s Tale

Transcripts of The Booker Prize Podcast are generated using both speech recognition software and human transcribers, and as a result, may contain errors.

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Mark Lawson:

You once told me, which I never known if it was a joke, that you taught yourself plotting by watching The Bill on television and soap operas, but is that true?

A.S. Byatt:

That is true. I’d forgotten, but it’s true. I watched The Bill in the early days when it was actually very psychological. The events were caused by the limitations of the policemen and the virtues of the policemen, and it was all very low-key. Then when it got to be like any other drama, I lost interest in it. They souped up the drama. But I used to watch Dallas until I realised I couldn’t stand missing an episode or not knowing what was happening and it wasn’t that important to me, so I stopped looking at it.

Jo Hamya:

Hello and welcome to the Booker Prize podcast with me, Jo Hamya

James Walton:

And me, James Walton, and today it’s Booker Novel of the Month time again. I hope you’ve all been swatting up on the 1990 Booker winner, Possession by A.S Byatt, who you heard there at the beginning of the show talking to Mark Lawson in 2019 and revealing the possibly unexpected fact that their plotting relied on the ITV cop show of The Bill and the American soap opera Dallas. Big in the ’80s for younger listeners, we also hope that if you haven’t been swatting up on the 1990 Booker winner, Possession by A.S Byatt, that you’ll enjoy the episode anyway.

Jo Hamya:

Oh, we’ll guide you through. Possession is a 600 page metatextual epic, which spans two centuries and it’s a kind of form of intertextual discourse, which basically just means that there are multiple kinds of text within one larger body of text. So a larger body of text is A.S Byatt’s possession as a novel, and the metatext within it are poems, journal articles and letters, which we’ll come onto later on.

In its time, it’s become something of a phenomenon. Since winning the prize it has been it alternately a bestseller, a Time Magazine and BBC Best English and Best English Language Novel of its era, and also the basis for a 2002 film starring Gwyneth Paltrow and Aaron Eckhart, which is fantastic because 2002 I think is the cut-off point of when Gwyneth Paltrow was still cool. That being said, we’re coming to Possession this month, of course, due to A.S Byatt’s passing last November.

James Walton:

But maybe let’s set the 1990 scene first. As for the Booker Prize, on the shortlist that year was An Awfully Big Adventure by Beryl Bainbridge, the third of her five shortlist appearances, none of which sadly and quite famously led to a win. She was known as the Booker Bridesmaid. There are also four other big names, certainly then, Penelope Fitzgerald with the Gate of Angels, Brianne Moore with Lies of Silence, John McGacken with Amongst Women, and Mordecai Richler with Solomon Gursky Was Here.

Now, I say big names then I’m sort of, it’s interested to know Joe, whether those names mean much to you as a … Sorry, I know I always wang on about this, but as someone younger born after 1990, in fact,

Jo Hamya:

I mean, to answer your question point blank, I haven’t read any Beryl Bainbridge, Penelope Fitzgerald, Mordecai Richler, Richler rather, anyone that you’ve mentioned, I haven’t read any of their books. I’m just familiar with the names because it’s my job to be.

James Walton:

And you’re very assiduous. But obviously one name that has stood the test of time is A.S Byatt. Do you want to tell us a bit about her?

Jo Hamya:

Yes, with pleasure. A.S Byatt is one of those people for whom the word prodigious seemed to be especially made. She was a fairly incredible and talented woman. She was born in 1936 in Sheffield, Yorkshire. I actually didn’t know this. She has two sisters, but you’d never really know it because one of them is Margaret Drabble, who survives her, and the two had a quite famous literary rivalry, which I’ll come onto in a bit. The other is the art historian, Helen Langdon.

James Walton:

And she’s pretty distinguished too, isn’t she? I mean, apparently when they were growing up, her mum used to say, “Girls, you all need to go to Newham College, Cambridge, because I did, and it’s great,” and they all did, which is just as well. Helen was the last one and she got in too.

Jo Hamya:

So as a child, Byatt attended boarding schools where she was apparently very unhappy and very asthmatic. She describes herself as being a bit of a recluse and sheltered away with books. May have started her love of reading. She’s quite the academic. She then attended Cambridge as an undergraduate, followed that up with a stint at a liberal arts school in Pennsylvania in the United States, and then went to Oxford.

Between 1962 and 1971, she lectured at what is now Birkbeck University, but was then just a constituent part of the University of London. Then from 1972 to 1983, she was at the Central School of Art and Design. And from 1972 to 1983, she lectured at UCL. She, as much as being a brilliant novelist and short story writer, was also a brilliant academic, but I love this quote from her from the New York Times in 1991. She says, “I’m not an academic who happens to have written a novel. I’m a novelist who happens to be quite good academically.” Which just, I mean, diva behaviour, but I’m here for it.

When she left Oxford, she went on to marry an economist called Ian Byatt. A.S. Byatt, her maiden name is Drabble, which her sister Margaret has kept, hence A.S. Byatt, Antonia Susan. But this is the rub. When she married Ian Byatt in 1959, her scholarly grant was terminated. Men who got married at university did not lose their grants. In fact, they got them increased. And interestingly enough, she says of the whole affair, “I got married in 1959 and went to live in Durham, which is another mediaeval place. In those days, if you were a woman, they took away your grant for getting married. If you were a man, they increased it. So I was with no grant, which secretly at some deep level, I was pleased about because I truly would have rather been a writer than an academic, and I needed to be forced into making that decision.”

Their marriage, however, maybe a bit predictably ended in 1969 and she went on to marry Peter John Duffy and they had two more children. I think she had …

James Walton:

Well, she had two, but there was one-

Jo Hamya:

Oh, two.

James Walton:

There was one big tragedy in our life which …

Jo Hamya:

Yes, so we’ll come on that. Her first novel, Shadow of the Sun, was published by Chatham and Windus in 1964. There’s this really funny anecdote that she gives in the Paris Review when asked about the process of publishing it, she said that she sent the manuscript off to John Beer, a Coleridge scholar who was a friend of hers, and he said that he thought the first part would make a nice little book. So he sent it to Cecil Day-Lewis at Chatham and Windus, who wrote to Byatt and said, “Would you like to have lunch?”

And she says, “So, I went to lunch with Cecil Day-Lewis at the Athenaeum where you had to eat in the basement because you’re a woman. He kept muttering, ‘Boardinghouse food, boardinghouse food.’ He didn’t really mention the novel. We talked about poetry and Yeats and Auden and Shakespeare, and it was literary conversation I had never had. When we got out on the pavement, I rather tremblingly said, ‘Might you be thinking of publishing this novel?’ He said, ‘Oh yes, of course. Of course.’”

James Walton:

Cecil Day-Lewis, he was probably poet laureate at the time. Well, I think he was. Also father of Daniel, only man to win three best actor Oscars.

Jo Hamya:

There you go, talented family. So it was followed by a book on Iris Murdoch, Wordsworth and Coleridge. She was a great friend of Iris Murdoch’s. And another novel, the Game in 1967. But in 1972, as you’ve alluded to James, she suffered the death of her 11-year-old son who was hit by a drunk driver, I think, which is just awful. And she stopped writing for just over a decade, about 11 years.

James Walton:

11. It seems to have been a sort of penance because he was-

Jo Hamya:

He was 11 years old.

James Walton:

It was the year of his 11th birthday, the week of his 11th birthday, and she taught for 11 years and then went back to full-time writing, I believe.

Jo Hamya:

Yes. She went back to Full-time writing in 1978 with the Virgin in the Garden, which began a tetralogy of novels, which are known as the Frederica Quartet. I’ve got this quote here I think from the Guardian that says, “Like Miss Byatt, Frederica and her siblings came in mid-20th century England, a period when even highly educated women were expected to stop working if they married. As Byatt’s own greatest terror was being trapped by domesticity, ‘I had this image,’ Miss Byatt said, ‘of coming out from under and seeing the light for a bit and them being shut in a kitchen, which I think happened to many women of my generation.’”

Since the fame of Possession in 1990, which is our topic for today, she wrote fairly regular short story collections until about the 2010s, including the Gin in the Nightingale’s Eye, and five successive novels including the Biographer’s Tale in 2000 and the Children’s Book, which was shortlisted for the prize, for the Booker Prize in 2009.

I feel like that’s a very potted summary of her life, but I just want to read her introduction to her Paris Review interview. For people who don’t know, the Paris Review magazine tend to do these very long conversations with prominent writers of a given decade or century. I think A.S Byatt’s intro by her interviewer is just one of the most fabulous and sparkling descriptions that I’ve ever read, and captures her as a person a lot better than I have with my summary.

James Walton:

Okay, let’s hear it.

Jo Hamya:

It reads, “Our conversation took place over the course of five days in the summer of 1998 in the garden of her house in the south of France. We talked over champagne by the side of a swimming pool, rather like the one in her short story, Alamier and Sir Venice. As the hot day cooled into evening, our conversations had the feeling of relaxation on both sides. Dame Antonia spent the days working on the Biographer’s Tale, and I submitted to the rigour of cycling and solitude up the ferocious mountains that surround her house.”

“One day we took a day off and drove to Nimes, that beautiful Roman city. Dame Antonia’s pleasures, they seemed equal in the dazzling glass Palace of the Canada, old bullfighting posters, a ravishing Matisse nude in pencil, and a superlatively delicious lunch at that great temple of the art nouveau, the hotel Imperator Concorde were contagious. Both of us I think, enjoyed the conversations.”

“However, as a break from more arduous activities, and although the interviewer should always try and keep the conversation to the point, it is not always easy to resist a feeling of delight as Dame Antonia moved on to evolutionary theory, nonconformism F.R. Leavis, and dozens of other topics with a sure swift movement of thought. There are few writers, so rich in intellectual curiosity, none perhaps who so definitely regards the life of the mind as a matter of pleasure taken and given in equal measure.” And that’s just …

James Walton:

That is lovely. Just very quickly, just to make the point that that swimming pool beside which they’re sipping, champagne has Booker significance, does it not?

Jo Hamya:

Is it the swimming pool she bought with her winnings?

James Walton:

Yes, it is.

Jo Hamya:

Yes.

James Walton:

The very same.

Jo Hamya:

Yeah, the swimming pool pool she bought with her winnings. Yes, definitely a woman who was interested in everything, spoke about every romantic language there is to speak. Read Dante in Italian. But as I say, whose profession is marked by her rivalry with her sister, Margaret Drabble, who published first. And I think in the early stages of Byatt’s career took most of the attention. And there’s this interesting quote from Byatt where she says, “Well, now I’m over 60 I can simply say this. The reception of my early novels was completely meshed up with the fact that my sister, Margaret Drabble, was a writer. Nobody looked to see what I was doing, not for quite a long time. She had written more novels and she wrote them faster.”

“I think it was extremely good for me in the long run because I had none of the things that most writers have, like the anxieties about reception. I just had this simple terror of being referred to as someone’s sister.” But I think to be fair to Margaret Drabble, when you hear Drabble’s side of the account, it’s a bit more heartbreaking. She says in 1978, “I was a rather lonely child when I was small. I made lots of friends when I was about 13 or 14 when it became all right to be intellectual, but I was a little child. I was often ill, I had a bad chest and was always rather feeble, hated games. I make myself sound pathetic, which I wasn’t, but I certainly didn’t feel I was part of the mainstream. I used to spend a lot of time alone writing and reading and just being secretive. My sister was not very nice to me, my big sister.”

James Walton:

Uh oh.

Jo Hamya:

“I used to tag along after her, and she was always, well, she used to play with me a lot when we were little. I think this is what went wrong. I used to expect her to go on playing with me, and of course she got bigger and didn’t want me around. That made me very sad, and I always felt that I had been shut out, rejected by her.”

James Walton:

Blimey. Yes, they both tried to play down the sibling rivalry and, at the same time, I think probably those newspapers played it up.

Jo Hamya:

But they didn’t mind making the odd comment about it, which [inaudible 00:12:40]

James Walton:

No, they didn’t. And there was also, they refer to the sort of tussle over material. So as you say, Margaret, Drabble goes first and obviously early novels tend to rely on the writer’s childhood and family background and so on, and Margaret Drabble got it all. So, I think A.S Byatt said in later life, one of the reasons she moved away into books like Possession and so on, was because the sort of material that perhaps she would otherwise have had was taken by Margaret. Should we move on to Possession then?

Jo Hamya:

Yes, tell us about it.

James Walton:

It’s a big old 600-pager, but I’ll try and summarise it with absolutely tonnes of stuff in it, but I’ll summarise it as pithily as ever I possibly can. So, it starts off with a guy, a bloke called Roland Mitchell, who is a mild-mannered scholar, very interested in the Victorian poet Randolph Henry-Ash who is fictional, although apparently the book makes it such a convincing sort of portrait of him that a lot of people looked up to find out who the real Randolph Henry-Ash was. He didn’t exist. But anyway.

So, he’s studying Randolph-Ash in the London Library, and he finds in a copy of Ash’s own personal copy of Vico, who listeners hardly need to be told, was a philosopher of the Italian Enlightenment, some letters that he had started to write, that Ash had started to write, to a mysterious woman that he was clearly keen on and that he clearly fancied and that he’d met at an event held by an academic called Crabb Robinson. Crabb Robinson is real, so they’re all mixing up. Anyway, scholars for hundreds of years, well for a 100 years or so, had thought that Ash was happily and faithfully married to his wife, Ellen, although he had to wait 10 years to marry her because of her parents’ opposition.

So the big question is who was the mysterious woman to whom these letters were addressed? Because this book does have its cliffhangers. It has a sort of almost a thriller, detective work structure, which we will maybe return to. So anyway, off goes Roland and he finds Crabb Robinson’s Journal first, and all of these journals are reproduced in the book, and this suggests that the woman might be a poet called Christabel Lamott. And then he hears from another scholar that the leading British scholar of Lamott in Britain is a woman called Maude Bailey at Lincoln University, which I think is fictional at this point, Lincoln University, who’s also distantly related to Christabel Lamott.

So, off Roland goes to Lincoln meets Maude Bailey, who is beautiful, not insignificantly. They go and see Christabel’s grave and there they bump into Joan Bailey and Sir George Bailey from another branch of the Bailey family who owned the house where Christabel died. And through sort of a bit of a coincidence, but anyway, they end up getting invited to go to the house, and of course, they’re desperate

to know is there any Christabel memorabilia there? And by crikey there is, because in the room in which she died, they discover a cache of letters between her and Ash, which we get 45 pages of, and which prove that they clearly was an affair.

Now, they keep all this a secret from their fellow scholars, which is naughty I think in the context of academia, there’s Roland’s kind of boss Blackadder, who’s been working on a complete edition of Ash since 1951. There’s also Fergus Wolfe who’s modern and trendy, and he writes essays called things like the Potent Castrato, the Fellow Geocentric Structuration of Balzac’s Hermaphrodite Heroines/Heroes. I’m sorry, you get the idea. It’s meant to be hard. I certainly made it seem so.

Jo Hamya:

Indeed, it is. Yes.

James Walton:

I think I do full justice to its hardness there. So anyway, he writes that kind of essay that someone who could probably even give you the proper name of. So there’s him, there’s Blackadder, and then there’s a Leonora Stern, who’s an American lesbian, a big character. I mention her lesbianism because that’s significant because she is therefore, Byatt suggests, convinced that Christabel was a lesbian too, having an affair with her housemate, Blanche Glover. So again, these letters from Ash will disprove that too.

And then the villain of the piece is an American academic called Mortimer Cropper, who’s Ash’s biographer, and he’s buying up all stuff related to Randolph Henry-Ash, for his university collection in New Mexico.

Then we suddenly cut in a way that breaks all the rules of the novel at this point to show us Ash and Christabel going on a trip together to Yorkshire, to study natural history and ending up in bed. And I think Byatt wanted us to be shocked because it looked as though we were just going to be learning about them through the modern day scholars, and suddenly we’re plunged into their and shown their affair.

And meanwhile, back in the 20th century, the detective work continues more and more revelations pile up for more and more diaries and letters. I think I’ll stop all the spoilers there because with a lot of the book still to go. But basically the truth about Ash and Christabel becomes a kind of MacGuffin like Hitchcock with all the goodies and baddies after it, and it reaches a proper thriller climax at ash’s grave joined the Great Storm of 1987, after which we do get the full answers to everything. Including a bit that only we discover because Byatt tells us there’s one final twist that only we find out and that the scholars never do.

Ash himself is known as the great ventriloquist because he writes poems from different people’s points of view. But obviously one of the great feats of the book is that that Byatt herself becomes a great ventriloquist, reproducing letters, diaries, journals, and indeed lots and lots Victorian poetry, good Victorian poetry, supposedly written by both of them, but actually written by her. And here is a bit from the letters. This is Ash writing to Christabel Lamott as read by A.S Byatt herself.

A.S. Byatt:

“What a walk in what a wind, never to be forgotten. The clashing together of our umbrella’s spines as we lean to speak, and their hopeless tangling, the rush of air carrying our words away, the torn green leaves flying past and on the brow of the hill, the deer running and running against that labouring mounting mass of leaden cloud. Why do I tell you this, who saw it with me? To share the words too as we shared the blast and the sudden silence when the wind briefly dropped, it was very much your world we walked in. Your watery empire with the meadows all drowned, and the trees all growing down from their roots as well as up and the clouds swirling indifferently in both aerial and aquatic foliage.

James Walton:

And that was from the entire, the full ceremony of the 1990 Booker Prize, which is available on the Booker’s YouTube channel. Starts off with a lot of grumpy literary types saying we’re not a very good shortlist this year, when it was absolutely fantastic. Some things never changed. Anyway, Jo, I suppose question one is what did you make of the book?

Jo Hamya:

Whatever you think of Possession, I don’t think anyone could actually deny that it’s a really immaculately crafted novel. Everything has significance and everything ties into everything perfectly. The kind of parallels that are set up between the world of 20th century academia and these Victorian poets is just … It’s all really neat and it’s really witty. There are a lot of send-ups of second wave feminists, or of rich, grabby American academics, or of even just the ridiculousness of academia and status seeking itself.

I have a really complex response to this book because I can recognise that it’s formally perfect, and I can recognise the humour in it and some of the source material, at least in references to Tennyson or to various Victorian novels. But I’m just a little bit … I have the feeling that I’ve just not read this at the right time of my life. It didn’t really strike the kind of cord in me that it seems to have struck in a lot of people. But I think this is a common phenomenon because I asked around some friends who were Byatt fans, or alternately Victorian scholars, and they told me that the first time they read Possession they were also left a little bit cold. But then when they returned to it after a period of a few years that they just thought it was pure magic. So, I would say that I’m not unaware of its charms, it’s just that I’ve yet to feel them. What about you, James?

James Walton:

I think I felt them a bit more. I don’t think I’ve reached the pure magic stage yet. I must say I did thoroughly enjoy it. I really, I thought it was great. And she, Byatt herself talks about George Eliot, who’s her favourite, the idea that the surface is absolutely immaculate and just enjoy the surface. But you could go as deep as you want almost endlessly deep beneath that surface, and I feel that’s true of this book too, and we’ll go through some of it.

Some of the things, the issues that she’s going to say throws in isn’t, not throws in, but explores pretty thoroughly and brilliantly, I think are fascinating. I think there’s some cracking jokes. I think there’s a good thriller plot turning into a full scale, almost farcical chase by the end. But I would have to say that of a book that I’ve enjoyed as much as I enjoyed this book, I don’t think there’s any of them where I’ve been as bored as I sometimes was in this. We’ll come on to that.

Well, actually, the first question seems to come up with Possession is: did you skip all the Victorian poetry? And what was interesting to me, and I was almost scandalised, there’s an episode of Radio Four’s Book Club with A.S Byatt talking about Possession, and this question comes up, should we skip the Victorian poetry? And she says, yeah. She said, “I would.” [inaudible 00:22:30] surprised by this. So her dream reader powers through the book for the plot, enjoys the fun, and then if they want comes back and sees how brilliantly the poetry, A, works as poetry and B, reflects all the other themes and the relationship, and how much of it is you realise is owed to their relationship as well as to the big themes that the book explores. But I’m afraid I did read every word. But she’s a great believer in skipping. So I suppose, did you skip the poetry?

Jo Hamya:

I would say I probably skipped on balance about half of it. I skipped more towards the end than towards the beginning because, as with everything in this book, Byatt does a really great job of telling you everything from all possible angles. And there are several poems that she defers revealing because they have a significance that the readers in the novel, the academics in the novel can’t quite grasp, which is very clever because they’re all trying to appropriate these poems onto their own kind of brand of scholarly theory or their own motivations.

But the fact is you’ve heard about these poems from at least three possible angles. Meanwhile, you’ve got the unfolding saga between Randolph Henry-Ash and Christabel Lamott going on in the background, and you more or less have already pieced together an idea of why the poem is significant and what it’s about by the time you actually get to it.

So, I think in the beginning that was less the case because there was less of the novel, you had less to go on. But by the end I was sort of just a bit like, “Well, I know.” And I guess my other problem with them is that, and this is so clever of Byatt, I can’t stress enough how wrong I am in saying all of this, but what she’s doing is essentially imitating Victorian poetry and, to some extent, pre-Raphaelite poetry in all its facets. She’s also imitating all of the things that are so incredibly irritating about it. And so, there were points where my eyes just glazed over because I thought, “Oh God, I went through all of this as an undergraduate so that I’d never have to do it again, and now I’m here reading it again for work with the same complaints.”

So I mean, I skipped more towards the end, but I did skip. But that being said, as I say, it’s more than likely that I will go back to this book in the fullness of time not for work, and I’ll be able to drink it in a bit better. But I agree with Byatt. Because she holds you so firmly throughout the kind of narrative of the book and also through the letters and the biographical details, it doesn’t make a difference whether you read it or not because done such a good job of setting you up with an idea of them anyway.

James Walton:

Yeah. I must admit ,the bits where I had to grip my teeth most, I think. Well, as I said, there’s 45 pages of correspondence between Ash when they first find the original cache of letters, which is followed by that, I think a 10-page poem, sort of vaguely related. But that 45 pages, it does get to the bit where they fall in love and everything, and that’s terrific. But first of all, there’s lots of discussions of marine biology and poetry and sentences like, “Your citation from Paracelsus was of course familiar to me,” that kind of thing of two Victorian scholars. Brilliantly ventriloquized as it’s meant to be. But there was bits of that. But Byatt in that same Book Club thing shocked me even more by saying that she thinks that all readers always skip when they’re reading novels and they note that no reader ever reads every sentence of a novel. Tell me that’s not true, Jo? Or have I been being a sucker all my life?

Jo Hamya:

I think she’s actually being incredibly generous because I don’t think she’s saying that people, well, some people do voluntarily skip over bits of a book that they can’t be bothered to read as we did with some of the poems, or you didn’t James while I did. But I think she’s also being quite generous in the sense that, I don’t know, haven’t you ever had the experience of reading a book for the first time and thinking that you’ve caught every sentence and you read it again for the second time and you realise, “Oh, I did slip a sentence.” It’s just faulty eyesight, or just maybe you changed from room to room and you did skip something. I think it’s an incredibly generous view.

And that being said, I’m being very harsh. Some of the poetry is very gripping. I think for me, the best poem in the book, and I did not know that that Byatt had lost a child at the time that I was gripped by it, but was the fragmented poem that’s found that Christabel Lamott writes after … Well, this is a spoiler, but it’s not, after the loss of a child, which may not have been the loss of a child or may have been a loss of a child. You’ll have to read to find out.

James Walton:

But you will find out.

Jo Hamya:

But yes, that is absolutely beautiful. So I think she’s right. You can skip it and you are not much affected. You can read the bits, which I, by the end, what I was doing was I was scanning. I wasn’t flipping over pages entirely, but I was scanning and when something would catch my eye, I would go back and read it for pleasure, but not to understand any of the greater machinations of the plot.

James Walton:

Yes, no. But when you do, of course the poems are … Well, first of all, as she says herself, she takes, I think, credit for her own courage in that these are not meant to be minor poets. These are meant to be great poets. And so she’s writing great poetry. And as I say, they all tie in with the themes and they reflect each other and they reflect what’s going on. They reflect what’s happening in the modern day as well. So you’ve got the parallel with Maud and Roland very hesitantly falling for each other. And in fact, what’s sort of interesting, this is just almost in passing, but the Victorians, the Victorian couple get down to it much quicker than the modern.

Jo Hamya:

Yes. Well, the thing that you haven’t mentioned so far is that Roland, naughty boy, has a girlfriend at home called Val, who not only is his girlfriend, but also his breadwinner. So essentially, while he’s off gallivanting with Maud, and he is very good about being very careful not to fall in love with Maud, he’s being subsidised by Val. He’s working menial jobs. She calls them her menial work back at home. And that, of course is a parallel with Randolph Henry-Ash and his wife Ellen, and a parallel with Blanche Glover whose work is never fully appreciated and who-

James Walton:

And this is Christabel’s housemate who does seem to be in love with her.

Jo Hamya:

Yes. So, this figure of a woman who, now that I think about it, is like Byatt saying that she’s terrified of ending up as a scholar’s housewife stuck in a kitchen. But this figure of a woman, who as Val is and as Blanche Glover is, who has so much to offer, who is so deeply intelligent, who is capable of producing really good work, but is so undervalued in her time that she ends up just struggling for a man.

James Walton:

Very clever women just completely underachieving because of the world around them is a big thing. I think that’s partly linked to A.S Byatt’s mother as well. I think a lot of that generation, their feminism came from observing their extremely clever mothers being housewives.

This is one of the, I think the most thrilling bits of the book actually is that her brilliance on the idea of intellectual fashions and how they get sort of refashioned, because they’re all there to answer the same question really. So Ash is a classic, what at school we used to talk about Victorian poems of faith and doubt. So basically is there a God? And Ash is one of those poets who’s beginning to think, no, there isn’t. And so we were witnessing the death of a belief in God in the Victorian times. But one thing that Byatt made clear to me, when that phrase trots out in the Victorian poems of faith and doubt, what a massive deal that is.

Jo Hamya:

Yeah, it’s come up before in this podcast, in Arthur and George with Gwen and Doyle as well,

James Walton:

But then in her way, she also draws parallels with … Because by the time Rowland and Maud are doing their thing, there is another thing that cannot ever be denied, that the way that God for ages could not be denied. Maud says the whole of our scholarship, the whole of our thought, we question everything except the centrality of sexuality. So, now that’s the new orthodoxy that she’s beginning to doubt slightly. A.S. Byatt once said, she was terribly surprised when actually, because she was reading through the History of Ideas, “I was terribly surprised when I hit Freud. It didn’t resemble my experience.” And there’s a good bit of Freud in the book, actually. This is where Maud’s beginning to doubt Freud the way Ash is doubting God.

It’s a bit odd now because I think 40 years on Freud is we don’t think is particularly true, do we? But anyway, they did then, and they’re beginning to wonder about it, and this is Freud famously on penis envy. And it says, this must be one of the bits that A.S. Byatt didn’t recognise in her own experience. But it says, “At no point in one’s analytic work does one suffer more from a suspicion that one has been preaching to the winds than one when one is trying to persuade a woman to abandon her wish for a penis.”

Well, I think it’s meant to be funny that and it sort of is, and yet there’s continuity as well at the same time. One of his poems, one of Ash’s poems, which we get as usual at some length, it’s called Ragnarok, and was seen as anti-Christian by some and by others as Christianising Norse myth, but it’s clearly both. It’s the way, well, it says, Ash writes, “The human imagination mixes and adopts to its current preoccupations, many ingredients to new wholes, as the stones of the Roman road go to the construction of dry stone walls. Such tales, men tell and have told they do not differ, save it in emphasis here and there.” Maud says, when she reads Ragnarok, “It seems to me that he made holy scripture no more than another wonder tale.” And then Freud becomes a wonder tale. Then the quest for the truths about Ash and Lamott, these are just one to tell. People want to believe something and they persuade themselves It’s true by gathering, well, by gathering what evidence they can and ignoring what evidence they don’t want to see.

Jo Hamya:

I think Roland puts it a bit more pointedly midway through the book. He says to Maud, “Do you never have the sense that our metaphors eat up our world? I mean, of course everything connects and connects all the time. And I suppose one studies, I study literature because all of these connections seem endlessly exciting and then in some sense dangerously powerful, as though we held a clue to the true nature of things. I mean, those gloves a minute ago, we were playing a professional game of hooks and eyes, mediaeval gloves, giants’ gloves, Blanche Glover, Balzac’s gloves, the sea anemones ovaries, and it all reduced like boiling jam to human sexuality just as Leonora Stern makes the whole Earth read the female body and language, all language and all vegetation is pubic hair. Maud laughed, dryly, Roland said, ‘And then really, what is it? What is this arcane power we have when we see that everything is human sexuality? It’s really powerlessness.’” And that’s probably the beginning of his unravelling.

James Walton:

And Maud again, sorry, in every age there must be truths people can’t fight. Whether or not they want to, whether or not they will go on being truths in the future.

Jo Hamya:

But do you think there’s a truth like that in Possession? A truth that cannot be fought? I suppose that might be the the extracts we get that the academic characters in this book don’t get to see, the vignettes and the letters that they never get to read. The fact of what happened is the truth that the novel points to.

James Walton:

Yes, that’s right. Yeah, no, that’s brilliant. Obviously for Maud, again, it’s Freud. We live in the truth of what Freud discovered, whether or not we like it. We’re not really free to suppose to imagine he could possibly have been wrong about human nature. But I think even by the time this came out, I don’t think anyone has the kind of faith in Freud that Victorians had in God or that academics in the ’80s have had him Freud,

Jo Hamya:

God, I wish I liked this book more.

James Walton:

Honestly, it is a fantastic book.

Jo Hamya:

It’s so rich. It’s lovely.

James Walton:

We are so scraping the surface.

Jo Hamya:

Yeah, we are, but it’s because we’re-

James Walton:

We haven’t even gotten to seances and mediums.

Jo Hamya:

Our overlords.

James Walton:

And how they make the dead come to life through stories and in the same way as the novel does in the same way as the way it all just beautifully hangs together. And I still think you do have to grit your teeth through some, we’re beginning to wonder deliberately, slightly tiresome bits of academic study, but on the whole story rattles along. Plus, there’s all these things that you can think about as much as you can and without ever coming to the end of it.

Jo Hamya:

I think, actually, there’s this thing that Byatt says to your point about it sort of rattling along by its own speed. She says that, “Possession has that kind of dreadful energy that comes of having written it from the first word to the last with the whole book in your head.” And there’s this interesting bit, I’m not going to have time to find it now, but there’s this interesting bit where Byatt’s narrator talks about letters being written for a particular reader, not for readers in general, just for one reader who is receiving the letter. And I feel like Possession is a novel for Byatt, and it’s brilliant because Byatt is brilliant. But for that, I also found it not impenetrable because I understood it, but I guess emotionally impenetrable.

James Walton:

And should we just finish by having a little wild stab at why this book that I do really like and you sort of respect.

Jo Hamya:

I admire.

James Walton:

But yeah, respect, but don’t warm to, but we both agree has its punishing moments, is a huge seller. I mean, part of it was winning the Booker for sure, but the books have won the Booker before without selling as much as this did. Why was this a massive seller? Byatt herself looked absolutely bewildered by

it. Whenever she was asked, she said, “No idea. I never thought it would.” She took it to American publishers, they said, “Cut out all the Victorian poetry, cut out all the Victorian journals, just do the modern love story and we’ll publish it.” And none of them, it wasn’t published in America until it won The Booker, began to sell in Britain, and then they took it as it was, and it sold there too. But why?

Jo Hamya:

I would say that maybe it’s partly because it has such a dedicated cult following. I mean, the people who love this book really love it. They deeply, in the true sense of the word cult, love it. And they do a great job of advertising it. They really do. And it’s very inspiring to hear what they make of it. I mean, in a way, it’s spawned its own branch of academic theory, this book.

James Walton:

And it becomes something that people so believe in so much that they daren’t go against it. See F. Freud and God.

Jo Hamya:

I think also Byatt is the kind of author who, she’s the sort of woman with a mind that you want, you want to know and be a part of at least once in your life. If you can’t get to speak to her, which now we can’t, but then you want to read one of her books and perhaps because this one won the Booker Prize, this is the one that everyone goes to immediately. But I think I’m going to try something else from her. Sure. There’s something that will click, and I’m sure Possession will click in a few years for me as well.

But to be honest with you, I’m just as confused as Byatt because I would not have pecked this as a … I don’t know. Well, maybe because it’s such a kind of detective romp and it’s got romance and it’s got the aspects of that kind of big stately Victorian novel. I mean, to be honest, it’s got all the component parts of a bestseller, doesn’t it?

James Walton:

Yeah, it has.

That’s it for this week. If you’d like to find out more about Possession by A.S Byatt, head to TheBookerPrizes.com,

Jo Hamya:

You can also discuss the book with our Booker Prizes book group on Facebook. Just search for the Booker Prizes.

James Walton:

And remember to follow us on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok and Substack at the Booker Prizes. I suspect you will remember because we remind you every week. But there we are.

Jo Hamya:

Nice one, James. We’ll be back next Thursday

James Walton:

Until then and to play us out, here’s more from the late A.S. Byatt as interviewed by Mark Dawson. Goodbye.

Jo Hamya:

Bye.

Mark Lawson:

In the pattern you’d established, the book which should have appeared in around 1990, would’ve been the third in the quartet. And indeed, I remember around 1982, you did a lecture at University College, and it was the book you were writing. It was the third book, and it was going to come out about then, and it didn’t. It was a quite different unrelated novel, Possession, which as it turned out, it changed your writing life quite significantly. But what led you to interrupt the sequence?

A.S. Byatt:

One has to tell the truth, as my father always said. I had between the planning of the novels and the writing of them experienced an accident in the death of my son, experienced it so violently that I found it almost impossible to bring myself to write the accident which I had planned. The splinter of ice was not big enough, and I felt very superstitious and frightened. And I was very worried by having thought in this abstract way about accident when I then had gone through it. And then I thought I’d do something else.

And then I had this idea for Possession, which came from the word possession. And I thought to myself, “If you don’t write that now, it’ll get old and tired by the time you get round to it after the end of the quartet.” And so, I thought, “I’ll write that now and go right away from the whole of anything to do with my life.” And I did it for pure literary pleasure. And I never thought it would be a bestseller, let alone means so much to people in countries all over the world. People appear from Korea and the Philippines and say, “This is my favourite book.” It’s a book about academics in a library. It’s very weird. But it was written with intense pleasure in the language. I think that’s what did it.

James Walton:

The Booker Prize podcast is hosted by Joe Hamya and me, James Walton. It’s produced and edited by Kevin Miyolo, and the executive producer is John Davenport. It’s a Daddy’s SuperYacht production for the Booker Prizes.