First posted on GoodReads, but I'd better get into the habit of xposting here, especially if they start yanking stuff that has cursing in it (I'm doomed)....
(Including some status updates material in this - )
Not even at
the halfway point yet, but I am so baffled and dismayed. I love Byatt
(loved Possession like everyone else, but I schooled myself to love the
Frederica Potter quartet and other novels too), this book is all about
topics I love, and so it totally should be my jam, as the kids say,
and....instead it's like the dire moment in Little Women when Meg wails
about how the jelly won't jell.
I think the biggest problem is
the characters - some critics compared this to Middlemarch, but
Middlemarch is all _about_ its characters, who leap immediately to mind
-- the idealistic Dorothea, the vulnerable Lydgate, wild Will, vengeful
Causabon, each face and personality rendered distinct. The relative
flatness of people in Possession didn't matter because it was a satire,
and the amount of satire in the Frederica Quartet -- contrasted with
some real tragedies, like Jude Mason's -- carried those people fairly
well. (Frederica was that very odd thing, a self-portrait intended to
provoke dislike: Byatt seems to specialize in that.)
Also, there
were a LOT FEWER people in even the Quartet books. It's not so much that
there are too many people in this novel -- although there are -- but
they're really not differentiated. If I have to keep reminding myself
Phyllis is not Dorothy (Phyllis is the pretty shallow one, Dorothy is
the studious friend of Tom, Tom is his mother's favourite, Julian
is....Geraint? no no) that is not a good thing. Byatt is, like Lawrence
('whom I cannot escape, and cannot love'), Murdoch (Byatt's moral and
aesthetic ideal), even, dare I say, Drabble, and certainly Lessing, one
of those most frustrating writers -- a naturally gifted novelist who
keeps wrenching Story around to serve Theme.
This is especially
bad in Byatt because when she includes bits of retold myths, or
children's stories, or pastiche poetry, you at once relax into what
she's telling you -- it feels free and unstrained in a way all that
carefully glossy worked-over prose doesn't. In Possession, which was a
story about people entranced by stories, and had much less of that
"writing is bad for families and especially mothers and really
especially children" crap in it, it all worked. But as she herself said,
she knew people would love Possession; she considers it lesser. She
loves writing these long strenuous brain-taxing
half-nonfiction catalogues. But they are impossible to love as Stories.
She really is like Lawrence -- her
gift plays free in short stories, devastating and wonderful, but she
puts it into harness and blinders writing anything at length.
-- To
top it off, neither the potted history, which should provide the epic dark-and-gold-illuminated backdrop for the (flat) people, nor the
close-ups on the richly decorated plates, embroidered dresses and
kimonos, building ornaments and so on, are distinct enough for me to
picture, so it all winds up being a kind of grand-sounding blur.
Possession had the anchor of the actual poetry and academic papers and
fairytales and letters; they were the backbone of the story.
Here, the interludes of Olive's children's tales serve mainly to remind
what a good writer Byatt is when she isn't dragging us by the hand on her own whistle-stop tour of Cultural History. (I remember
vaguely learning in grad school about the Morris wallpapers and chairs
and carpets and tapestries and hangings and whatever else the Pre-Raphs
churned out like medieval factories, but I know nothing about pottery
and can't visualize it, and so don't really care. This is disastrous, as
pottery is one of the main Themes of the book.)
descensus Averno facilis est