I wrote this immediately after i read the book/watched the movie.
AS Byatt deserved it.
It’s usual to mourn the ruining of a good book, by movie maker who seal things that aren’t of the essence, and leave only the bare bones of plot, distorted by levels of over-simplification. This is why the lord of rings is easy to dislike, what with it’s clearly stated obsession with making every battle picture-perfect, orc by orc. While turning Frodo’s strengths into formidable weakness, and making all of the subtlety that Tolkien suggests for the magic of the ring into storms and shadows and hoarse voices.
But it’s worse, apparently, to destroy a book that’s not-so-great.
Possession is a book that’s so well thought-of that i ought to just shut my gob. But i can’t help but think it was a book with massive flaws. A book that ends too pat, with action and adventure that is quite a shock after the relative quiet of the rest of the book. Though even along the way, it has it’s share of shrill moments and silliness. and the plot, stripped of it’s literary complexity, is more deserving of the da vinci code, than of a woman more famous as a critic than a novelist.
What the makers of the movie have done, is to do that very thing. To excise the mystery of the hunt, the uncertainties of the scholars as they discard the positions they had held for so long. The title’s many-layered meaning: possession of the letters that are exchanged, the way in which, as byatt would have it, that scholars are possessed by the lives of the writers they study; of the right to live a private life, and the roundabout that leads to such a dramatic ending.
The book’s conjectures, it’s suggestions and the possibility that this is merely one explanation for the facts at hand (which i found fascinating) have been discarded wholesale in favour of visible, in-your-face angst, which replaces the mere suggestion of silences and headaches that christabel’s letters (in the book) give the reader. And somehow, as much as i like Jennifer Ehle, she makes a better Elizabeth Bennett than a Christabel la Motte, who ought to be an ice princess, not so buxom, hearty and so full of life, so ready with her smile. Which is a kind of transformation that they’ve performed with Maud bailey’s character as well, but only to the extent that Gwyneth Paltrow’s natural iciness allows.
