As Byatt’s novel Possession, which won the 1990 Booker Prize, was and is one of those relative rarities — the literary bestseller. This massive tale of academic archaeology and rivalry, larded as it is with reams upon reams of pastiche Victoriana, letters, poems and stories (not to mention the odd post-structuralist feminist essay), is almost too rich and overloaded a dish. Yet Byatt managed, on top of all that, to give it the readability of a bonkbuster.
Byatt draws the reader swiftly into the mystery of Victorian poet Randolph Henry Ash’s relationship with poetess (they still had poetesses in those days) Christabel LaMotte, a mystery stumbled upon by down-at-heel researcher Roland Mitchell, who enlists the help of frosty feminist scholar Maud Bailey. Around them buzz a host of minor characters upon whom the author or authoress has nonetheless lavished the kind of attention usually reserved for major figures. The novel is a piece of post-modern play, as well as a tribute to the Victorian era: it is Victorian in its expansiveness as well as in the writer’s casual omniscience. It is a romance as well as a mystery, and despite Byatt’s undeniable skills as
a pasticheur (pasticheuse?), this reader, for one, had eventually to skip over much of the epic poetry and phantasmagoric fairytales to find out what the hell was going to happen.
The movie version takes a similar approach. It boils down the book’s 500-page narrative to its core: the academics’ quest to find the truth about Ash and LaMotte, and their relationship as it develops in counterpoint to that of the Victorians. The pastiches are gone, and the surrounding characters are much reduced in scale. Director Neil LaBute and his co-scriptwriters David Henry Hwang and Laura Jones also give the dialogue a more zippy, contemporary tang than Byatt allowed her characters.
In the novel, Byatt cheats. It happens about halfway through, with the reader at least knee-deep in the intricacies of the literary search, and having seen thus far only what Roland and Maud are allowed to see. But Byatt punctures all the suspense she has built up over the previous 272 pages to give us a direct glimpse of Ash and LaMotte. For me, this seemed both unnecessary and clumsy. In the movie, LaBute et al place the present-day and Victorian narratives in parallel right from the start. We flash between them as the story unfolds, and it is very effective. Keeping the truth about Ash and LaMotte at arm’s length would not have worked here.
LaBute, in fact, is an unlikely director for this movie. His earlier films, which he also wrote, The Company of Men and Your Friends and Neighbours, were brutal assaults on the idea that human relationships, particularly sexual ones, are about anything other than power and self-regard. He changed tack with Nurse Betty (not written by him), to make a bittersweet comedy, but, still, Possession seems like the opposite of the kind of material he would choose to tackle. That he does it so well, and comes out with a realistic but generous view of love, is startling. And satisfying.
Apart from streamlining and focusing the story, LaBute’s most significant change is to make Roland Mitchell an American rather than British. The loss is that Mitchell, in the book, is such a particular kind of self-defeating and sexually hesitant Brit; Aaron Eckhart, as Roland in the movie, is equally down-at-heel, but he has an in-built physical charisma that gives the role an entirely different charge from the start. Once you’ve forgotten the Roland of the book, though, Eckhart’s performance convinces entirely; moments such as that in which he strips off and dives into a forest pool make good use of his relatively uninhibited Americanness to advance the plot. Eckhart, by the way, has to be one of the best American actors of his generation.
Gwyneth Paltrow, as Maud, is an American playing English. This is something of which Paltrow has made rather a speciality of late. Her accent is fine, but her manner does not entirely convince. Instead of that peculiarly English form of repressed sexuality, which is what she should be demonstrating, she projects a distinctly American Generation X blankness. Nonetheless, she gets away with it.
Jeremy Northam is perfect as Ash, and Jennifer Ehle does reasonably well as LaMotte, though her face seems capable of no expression other than mild surprise. At times she seems a parody of Meryl Streep in The French Lieutenant’s Woman. It’s a pity we don’t get to see more of Ash and LaMotte, but there’s enough to keep the story on track. And, despite these gaps, Possession carries one along effortlessly. Others have found it less convincing and less interesting; I don’t know how it would look to someone who hadn’t read the book. For me, though, it is an excellent adaptation: it doesn’t replace the novel, but it doesn’t traduce it either. LaBute’s Possession is not as rich a dish as Byatt’s, but neither is it fast food.