Possession: A Romance. By AS Byatt

I'm still on winter holiday in Holland, and have no access to Man Booker Prize books.  So this first entry (or two) will be from memory.  In a way it is related to the David Lodge book I'm reading now, Small World, as it's about English Literature academics and poets, and it is a romance, in the classical sense... yes there are love stories in the novel, but as a whole it is about the medieval notion of the quest/finding adventure.

There are four main characters, two modern day academics, Roland Michell and Maud Bailey, and two poets who lived during the Victorian era, Randolph Henry Ash and Christabel LaMotte. (These are non historical characters, but Byatt was inventive enough to create poems "written" by them.)  The basis of the novel is that the modern day academics discover love letters revealing an affair between the two Victorian characters, which is a surprise, because Randolph was married, and Christabel was in a long-term lesbian relationship.

The book takes a few pages to get into, because AS Byatt really wants you to feel like you're entering another world, a magical strange world, and uses heavy language, but the story is compelling.  One of the loveliest scenes in the novel has to do with one of the characters interacting with their child for the first time on an ordinary day, in a meadow.  "Of some things their are no records"  that section of the book says.  This is true.

As a busy parent, there are lots of mental images I have of my son that have never been captured with a camera or discussed with his dad or family or friends, but merely dance around in my head and can be triggered by anything.  When I see a leaf falling from a tree in autumn, for instance, I recall him and a friend of his sprinting past me after school, and scattering a big pile of leaves as both five-year-olds run through it, looking at each other and laughing, in the exuberant way only the young can laugh.  It was a gray day, the leaves were brown and pale yellow, so their blue uniforms made a very striking picture.

Similarly in Possession, a little girl makes a chain necklace of flowers, runs around in the Spring grass, and laughs.  She enjoys herself thoroughly, but she forgets the mundane happy moment, and a message she was meant to pass on.
 
I read this book in the mid 1990s, when I was still living in San Francisco, so the fact that I still remember parts of the story vividly is pretty revealing about how good it is. How much do you possess those you love?  How much does what you love posses you? The reader ponders these issues of free-will, relationships, and hidden personal history in this book.