There are pages of poetry and prose written by Byatts fictitious characters, and her pace is leisurely and at times. Whalers were gross and the ships attacked by whales deserved it. At the end, there is a nicely satiric academic version of a climactic police chase, complete with a graveyard stakeout where all is revealed, villainy punished, and true love acknowledged. I felt like I was slowly losing my faculties as I read.īasically in this metaphorical game of Ahab and the whale, the whale has eaten Ahab and roams the ocean still, his teeth bloody. I had to force it the whole way.Īnd it was frustrating, because this sounds like something I would love, but the style absolutely 1000% did not work for me. In the present (1984) there are the English literature academics, Roland Michell and Maud Bailey. It’s like I’m a magnet and this book is a magnet and you try to push the wrong ends together, and they just push each other apart. To be quite honest with you, before I started speed-reading this, while I was genuinely trying to read it straight, a great deal of it was being interpreted by my brain as absolute gibberish.

The White Whale square was like a siren song for me, and I figured this would be a perfect time to finally read this book, and give it a real shot. I got 48 pages in before I said I’d try it another time. Publication date 1990 Publisher Random House First Edition edition Collection. I bought this ages ago, probably over a decade, and finally gave it a try about six years ago. The short answer is most likely that I’m just not the right reader for this book (and this author, which is why I’ve deleted The Children’s Book from my TBR). This review will not be long, for this book has defeated me, and in such a way that I don’t overly feel like enumerating what went wrong here.

Possession as byatt review