A.S. Byatt is my new favourite author maybe

I just finished reading Possession (around 10am actually). Holy freaking cow. Reading it has been like doing a headlong immersion dip in imagery. Or something. I'm just amazed right now, in the old sense of the word and in the modern sense of the word.

I'm going to have to do a lot of thinking about some of the stuff in this book to do with poetry and writing poetry. I definitely want my own copy of it (and puppytown would probably like her copy back).

I'm also thinking a little about the nature of "journals", who they get written for, who reads them, why, what makes them up. I was quite taken with Ellen Ash's writing in the book about the private nature of diaries which touched a bit for me since I've been reading Pepys' Diary which is, for me anyway, a very interesting little blog exercise (although 10 years! might be a long time to follow a blog) and was never meant for any actual audience or reader, except maybe himself. And there's a marvelous little excerpt in Possession from another character, Sabine, about using the diary as her writing journal, her reasons why, who she think her audience is or ought to be, what she can say or do within the journal while writing it.

And I wonder if anyone has kept track of how blogs have developed. And where they'll go, how they'll change with time. How they'll come to be seen, in terms of property, when someone dies while keeping one. How different they are from private journals in Victorian times since they often have a half-acknowledged or even fully-engaged audience with feedback and corrections and changes to format, content, provider. Will anyone in the future want to publish a manuscript of the collected journal entries of Neil Gaiman, for example? Or Terry Pratchett, who has been a long time contributor to some Usenet groups, including his own alt.fan group.

Oh, and the power of naming, something I've often felt. The ability of a word or set of words to convey more as a name than it can by itself. I sometimes think that's the real power of writing and poetry especially. To give us words for ourselves and our experiences, to add to our ability to communicate by giving us more meaning than we would have with just the syntax and structure of the phrases. No wonder writing was like a kind of magic, no wonder we valued our storytellers and singers, the actors moving in the flickering light and giving breath to the words. To name something and give it breadth in doing so, instead of constriction and limitation. What a difficult, joyous thing.

More on Byatt

And here's what you can get off the web about Byatt's Possession: an introduction.

Two interesting things. First, she did indeed write all the poetry herself. She says she's not a poet, but I don't care. :-) Second, apparently quite a few readers sent her letters complaining about the very few incidents when she felt obliged to provide 3rd person omniscient views of events outside the normal framework of the story. (If you've read the book, you know which scenes I mean.)

I'll admit that I shared this feeling at first, but the final scene changed my mind. I don't think we could have the final scene without having introduced this narrative extension into the story earlier. It wouldn't have made sense without the author gently nudging me away from the harsh restrictions of the main story earlier.

More than that, though, I felt that certain elements of irony or understanding would be missing in the later scenes without the injection of the additional information that the narrator has and the characters don't. But this wasn't how I felt initially when she used this device. I don't think that's a problem with her approach, but more a compliment to her construction of both the romance and the mystery. That I should buy into the device so completely that I don't want her to interrupt "the story" with these other bits is marvelous. And truly she does weave the injections in very well.

In the first, I felt she raised a level of initial ambiguity about who the characters were both in the interjected scene and in the subsequent scenes involving the main story line. In the second, she heightened my natural suspense about the story information, although the conclusion seemed foregone to me. In the final, I felt that she actually increased the poignancy of the resolution on the one hand while providing an ending satisfactory to all the parties (which a good romance should do, they are seldom tragedies after all).

Anyway, it's a fun little essay if you've already read the book. I'd strongly recommend temporarily overriding the colour settings on your browser, though, because the black text on red background was obnoxious.