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17 Antonia Byatt's Possession:A Romance Here isa novel of jade,jet, and apricot, in which a number of bathrooms are wondrously described. A fantasy? Not exactly. But two of its major characters, a mid-Victorian poet, Randolph Henry Ash (who, in the world of the novel, had some fame in his day, though his reputation in ours has fallen into the purely academic), and his all-but-unknown contemporary , Christabel La Motte (who managed to publish a fewvolumes, but who has only just been unearthed by diligent feminist critics), write works steeped in myth, fairy lore, and the supernatural. Christabel is something of a believer in things spiritual. Randolph approaches such topics with the attitude of a debunker in his solid nineteenth-century commitment to scientific rationalism. Scattered throughout the novel's 55O-odd pages isa considerable anthology of both poets' poems (and, in La Motte's case, some tales) more than sixty-five pages' worth— through which beneficent and maleficentfairies flitter, knights fare forth to meet enchanted maidens (who come both singly and in triplets), a city sinks into the sea, and a glass key opens a magic coffin releasing a princess from a century-long spell: This novel has enough of the decor and rhetoric of high fantasy to intrigue, if not wholly to delight, any traditional fantasy lover. Ash's major work is a twelve-book blank verse epic called Ragnawk—z Norse-style cosmogony, in which Ash identifieswith the slain god Baldur. La Motte's is another twelve-book epic called The Fairy Mdusina, based on a horrific folktale from Brittany, in which a beautiful fairy, spied on in her bath by the knight who falls in lovewith her, is revealed as a serpent-tailed demon, who eventually orders her husband to murder some of their more monstrous children. She is also a fine architect, however (what first attracts Christabel to the tale), who builds her castles 354 Shorter Views "foursquare and solid." From Byatt's description, it's something we might imagine the Christina Rossetti of "Goblin Market" to have written had she not veered off into consolationalverse. Possession begins when a timid but winning research assistant, Roland Mitchell, discovers a pair of letter drafts by Ash to an unknown woman whom he met at a breakfast party and with whom he was clearly taken. The woman is, of course, Christabel La Motte—who has established a Boston marriage with an aspiring Victorian woman painter, Blanche Glover (Christabel's Geraldine?), after the two artists, painter and poet, met at a lecture byRuskin. Roland fails to tell his boss, Professor Blackadder (the editor of Ash's complete works), about his discovery,because . . .well, because Roland is curious. (It's a word we find a number of times in the book.) He wants to find out what happened for himself. To this end, he seeks out Maud Bailly, a feminist La Motte scholar, who is also a distant relative of Christabel's family. The twobegin to compare scholarly notes and set out on a hunt for further evidence. Along the course, the simple—or not so simple— desire toknow eventuallyinfects most of the contemporary characters and impels both the Victorian tale and the contemporary one to their intertwinedconclusions. En route, an unsuspected correspondence between La Motte and Ash is discovered in a secret compartment in an unopened room in a decaying family manor house;journals—now by Blanche Glover, now byAsh's wife, Ellen, now by a young cousin of Christabel's, Sabine, on the selkiehaunted coast of Brittany—pop up all over the place, each supplying pieces to the nineteenth-century mystery. As well, we get several accounts of a seance, held by Mrs. Hella Lees, at which all sorts of things might have been going on. It all climaxes in rousing fashion at midnight in a rain- and storm-lashed churchyard replete with grave robbers. The portraits of the various academics (and their bathrooms!) who hunt, or protect from hunters, the various documents which form our center of interest are well-observedand often funny. There are a fewmoments , however,when the satirical thrusts—at an ambitiousAmerican academic (with his "bottomless checkbook") and at an enthusiasticAmerican women's studies professor (who offers herself for a consoling tumble to women and men alike—and always at the absolutely wrong time) —threaten to break out of the whimsical, where theywork, into the ugly, where—for me, with this book—they don't. LadyJoan Bailly, in her...

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