It's been a long while since I've read a book that I feel it will take me some time to emerge from emotionally, intellectually, and critically. Possession has consumed much of my thought for the past month and I have a feeling it will continue to do so until something else strikes me as vividly.

This book made me work. I see a lot of reviews complaining about the density of the language and the slow start, but one thing here is a fact: it's not the author's fault that your vocabulary isn't expansive enough to comprehend her novel. The end. I personally felt challenged by this story, by the great depth of not only the diction, but also most of the characters, the subtle callbacks to objects, subjects, or events in helping us solve the Ash/LaMotte mystery, and the parallel between the past and current lovers in the story. I was grateful that Byatt didn't baby me. She told a tale in her studied and scholarly way, and although I am sure some of the subtleties went right over my head even though I was absorbing the details contently, I'd go very near to saying I'm awed by the wholeness and completeness of this novel. As for the slow start, I admit, it took me awhile to get into it, simply because I had never read anything like it. But my patience was very rewarding. I think, for the review writers who did not finish the book, yours would be too.

As someone who (I can't call myself a story writer) has dabbled in only short stories in the past, my appreciation of the effort and concentration it took to craft this novel is immense. Byatt is a scholar, and although I found some of the details of the research her scholar characters were performing that were unrelated to the story a little dry, my mind still find it hard to encompass the depth of research it took, and note-taking of ideas it required, to make this story accurate and cohesive. Not to mention the complete fabrication of two fictional, highly acclaimed Victorian poets and their poetry. That alone deserves respect, but she also made me thirst for the rest of the LaMotte/Ash narrative just as Roland and Maud did. I had to know what happened. I was nearly obsessed with it. And although it doesn't take much to obsess me with fiction, this was obviously deserving of obsession. I could see that it was Byatt's goal for the reader, and one well achieved.

All that good being said, there were a couple things I didn't like. One- her portrayal of the American characters as either sexually obsessed, space-invading, or money hungry. This kind of affirms my view that the English think all Americans are this way- which is not true. Maybe this was not Byatt's intention, as she did make a couple cracks at the British way of life as well, but it certainly came across to me this way, and was a bit offputting. As a general warning, before I disclose my second dissatisfaction, it contains a spoiler for the ending of the novel:

I wasn't sold on the fact that Ash was able to locate his daughter, or that he would even believe she was alive to begin with after the seance in which he thought Christabel was asking after the soul of the "dead" child. I thought that this to him had pretty much been a confirmation of the child's death, and how he would know that Christabel's sister was raising her, much less where she lived, is beyond me. It felt a bit forced, as if Byatt was attempting to appease her reader so much in that instance that she went beyond the realms of believable plot. I personally would have been okay with Ash never knowing the fate of the child. It would have been fitting, actually, due to the lengthy discussions about whether the afterlife existed or not. It would have depended on the reader's faith, or lack thereof.

Overall, though, I think this was an amazing novel that contained characters who understood a love for words and narrative.