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Two scholars in the late 1980’s, one the devotee of a famous Victorian poet and the other a successful feminist literary theorist, embark on an academic adventure as they discover and trace a startling and unknown love affair between their respective Victorian subjects, and begin to have one of their own.
I’m going to say up front and flatly that this book is very, very clever, and that I was disappointed with it.
I’ll take it in order, though – cleverness first. The style and the writing are nothing short of exquisite. Byatt interjects the modern narrative with large swaths of fictionalized historical material – love letters, journal entries from a spurned lesbian lover and a quietly devastated wife, forgotten correspondence. The language is beautiful and note perfect, and I don’t think I really need to explain why I was so thoroughly charmed by the literary building of the historical relationship, and by this passage in particular written just after the first face-to-face meeting of significance.
The broken parallelism is also quite cleverly done. Byatt aligns the repressive constraints of Victorian sexuality against the militantly sexualized present. Her purpose is not to judge – which is refreshing – but rather to comment dryly upon the ways every relationship is subject, is contextual, is broken and constrained by the outside while the heart of that possession, that thing universal and a-historical that we call love won’t ever change.
She examines romance and academia with this same cool perceptiveness, as in the passage above, and there’s a well-figured larger thematic design – the possessive ownership of the biographer for subject, the self-possession to be sacrificed in love, the way the very looking at the thing changes it by owning it, all overlaid with a subtle net of the reader-writer relationship and how it tugs at both. And goodness, I missed books as intricately layered as this.
Yet, for all that cleverness – and I say again, it’s truly and excellently done . . .
I don’t know. I think it’s partly that it took me so very long to warm up to anybody. The academics are drawn with such vividness in their various commentative roles that, in their commentary, they are almost universally laughable, pathetic, or simply repulsive. And though it’s thematically right that our modern-day couple be so defined by the way the world has defined them – painfully neurotic, and of that particular type of scholar who possesses a plodding intellect that is fit for only one narrow subject, respectively – rather than how they truly are, it puts the reader in the awkward position of, well, needing over four hundred pages to get an inkling of giving a damn about them.
I did give a damn, eventually. A small one. But it struck me around page 500 that I could not think of a single occasion in the entire book when anyone, anywhere laughed. Ever. And sociological commentary can be as sharp-eyed as this, it seems, but if absolutely no one in the book can manage to crack a single smile over some of the deliberate absurdities, it seems the whole thing will grate on my nerves. Which it did.
It’s a good book, really I swear. It’s also designed specifically to bother me, the more I think about it. I imagine the people who recommended it to me didn’t have that problem, and in spite of that I thoroughly enjoyed the conceit, the literary execution, and the clever, perfect stitch placed at the very end. Still, it left a vaguely unsettled feeling, and not, I think, how it was intended to.
I’m going to say up front and flatly that this book is very, very clever, and that I was disappointed with it.
I’ll take it in order, though – cleverness first. The style and the writing are nothing short of exquisite. Byatt interjects the modern narrative with large swaths of fictionalized historical material – love letters, journal entries from a spurned lesbian lover and a quietly devastated wife, forgotten correspondence. The language is beautiful and note perfect, and I don’t think I really need to explain why I was so thoroughly charmed by the literary building of the historical relationship, and by this passage in particular written just after the first face-to-face meeting of significance.
And did you find-as I did how curious, as well as very natural, it was that we should be so shy with each other, when in a papery way we knew each other
so much better? I feel I have always known you, and yet I search for polite phrases and conventional enquiries; you are more mysterious in your presence
(as I suppose most of us may be) than you seem to be in ink and scribbled symbols. (Perhaps we all are so. I cannot tell.)
The broken parallelism is also quite cleverly done. Byatt aligns the repressive constraints of Victorian sexuality against the militantly sexualized present. Her purpose is not to judge – which is refreshing – but rather to comment dryly upon the ways every relationship is subject, is contextual, is broken and constrained by the outside while the heart of that possession, that thing universal and a-historical that we call love won’t ever change.
"Do you never have the sense that our metaphors eat up our world? I mean of course everything connects and connects---all the time--and I suppose one studies--I study--literature because all these connections seem both endlessly exciting and then in some sense dangerously powerful—as though we held a clue to the true nature of things? I mean, all those gloves, a minute ago, we were playing a professional game of hooks and eyes—mediaeval gloves, giants' gloves, Blanche Glover, Balzac's gloves, the sea-anemone's ovaries--and it all reduced like boiling jam to--human sexuality. Just as Leonora Stern makes the whole earth read as the female body--and language--all language. And all vegetation in pubic hair."
Maud laughed, dryly. Roland said, "And then, really, what is it, what is this arcane power we have, when we see that everything is human sexuality? It's
really powerlessness. ""
"Impotence," said Maud, leaning over, interested.
"I was avoiding that word, because that precisely isn't the point. We are so knowing. And all we've found out, is primitive sympathetic magic. Infantile polymorphous perversity. Everything relates to us and so we're imprisoned in ourselves--we can't see things. And we paint everything with this metaphor--"
"You are very cross with Leonora."
"She's very good. But I don't want to see through her eyes. It isn't a matter of her gender and my gender. I just don't."
Maud considered. She said, "In every age, there must be truths people can't fight--whether or not they want to, whether or not they will go on being truths
in the future. We live in the truth of what Freud discovered. Whether or not we like it. However we've modified it. We aren't really free to suppose--to
imagine he could possibly have been wrong about human nature. In particulars, surely--but not in the large plan--"
She examines romance and academia with this same cool perceptiveness, as in the passage above, and there’s a well-figured larger thematic design – the possessive ownership of the biographer for subject, the self-possession to be sacrificed in love, the way the very looking at the thing changes it by owning it, all overlaid with a subtle net of the reader-writer relationship and how it tugs at both. And goodness, I missed books as intricately layered as this.
Yet, for all that cleverness – and I say again, it’s truly and excellently done . . .
I don’t know. I think it’s partly that it took me so very long to warm up to anybody. The academics are drawn with such vividness in their various commentative roles that, in their commentary, they are almost universally laughable, pathetic, or simply repulsive. And though it’s thematically right that our modern-day couple be so defined by the way the world has defined them – painfully neurotic, and of that particular type of scholar who possesses a plodding intellect that is fit for only one narrow subject, respectively – rather than how they truly are, it puts the reader in the awkward position of, well, needing over four hundred pages to get an inkling of giving a damn about them.
I did give a damn, eventually. A small one. But it struck me around page 500 that I could not think of a single occasion in the entire book when anyone, anywhere laughed. Ever. And sociological commentary can be as sharp-eyed as this, it seems, but if absolutely no one in the book can manage to crack a single smile over some of the deliberate absurdities, it seems the whole thing will grate on my nerves. Which it did.
It’s a good book, really I swear. It’s also designed specifically to bother me, the more I think about it. I imagine the people who recommended it to me didn’t have that problem, and in spite of that I thoroughly enjoyed the conceit, the literary execution, and the clever, perfect stitch placed at the very end. Still, it left a vaguely unsettled feeling, and not, I think, how it was intended to.