A. S. Byatt, sister of novelist Margaret Drabble and a student of
Iris Murdoch's fiction, tackles human relations with a vigorous
exhaustiveness and an ironic seriousness reminiscent of those more
familiar writers. But somehow this revolving close-up of four young
people in crisis during Coronation Year, 1953, never quite exerts
the emotional tug that often underlies the thoughtful theme-chasing
of Murdoch and Drabble. Stephanie, Frederica, and Marcus are the
three children of snarling Bill Potter, resident curmudgeon at the
progressive Blesford Ride School in Yorkshire, and each of them
becomes entwined in a problematic emotional attachment while the
school and environs are caught up in an artsy, local Coronation
festival. Unmotivated, pliable Stephanie is wooed by a fat, coarse,
but blessedly down-to-earth and tender clergyman - and marries him
despite her father, who boycotts the wedding, furious that his
eldest and brightest is throwing herself away on domesticity with a
religious clod. Frederica, feverishly ambitious and itching to lose
her virginity, wins the apt role of young Bess in the Coronation
festival's main event, an outdoor play about Elizabeth I by
handsome young teacher Alex Wedderburn - who'd be the one to
deflower Frederica if not for his uncomfortable affair with a
married woman and his own tetchy preoccupations with growing-up. (A
swinging fellow-actor accomplishes the job instead; Frederica finds
it neither "particularly nice nor particularly nasty, more like
incessant Tampax.") And worst off of all is reclusive, terrified,
adolescent Marcus, whose disturbing tendencies toward fantasies and
visions are pounced upon and churned up by a quietly psychotic
teacher; their "experiments" with the paranormal spiral into
homosexual advances and a pathetic breakdown. In carefully paced,
alternating chapters, Byatt develops each story line, and the
parallels among the characters' varied awakenings are clearly
drawn. Perhaps too clearly. Often mannered, occasionally precious,
and ever dense with literary allusions and inventories of facts and
feelings, Byatt's rather artificial narrative is never less than
readable, rarely less than interesting; an audience hungry for
intelligent, layered, literate fiction may hardly mind the lack of
spontaneity and passion. (Kirkus Reviews)
A novel which combines enlightenment and sexuality, Elizabethan drama and contemporary comedy. It is a tale of a brilliant and eccentric family, fatefully divided. The author won the Booker Prize and the "Irish Times"/Aer Lingus International Fiction Prize in 1990 for "Possession".
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