Alongside the different voices are various tones: the brash academic comedy of Cropper waving his American cheque book around as he negotiates small English country lanes in his unwieldy Mercedes; the more affectionate humour associated with Leonora Stern and her 80s feminist-theoretical readings; and the sad archivist Beatrice Nest who has been working on an edited edition for the previous twenty-five years and has nothing much to show for it. So if I construct a fictive eyewitness account- a credible plausible account- am I lending life to truth with my fiction- or verisimilitude to a colossal Lie with my feverish imagination? He first has to let the machine warm up, and then: "in the dim and hum of the extractor fan he took out the two letters and read them again.

His slippers, mole-black velvet, were embroidered in gold thread with a female head surrounded by shooting rays or shaken hair. There were parts where the rhythm of it was enough, and parts where I read and re-read a page again and again until I felt I had understood it on many levels. After everything has ended, Roland and Maud admit that they have fallen in love and begin a relationship together that somewhat mirrors that of Ash and LaMotte. And finally there is a lot to laugh about the (charming and pathetic) passion of literary scientists for their object of study and the unorthodox methods they use to outdo each other. There were notices about mutilation of volumes, about theft, with which he quite failed to associate himself.I think it is quite difficult to maintain a story within a story, span different ages, and have all the characters seems real and interesting. Ash asks his daughter to pass on a message to LaMotte that he is happy now, but the little girl forgets to do it. Thus it is revealed that both the modern and historical characters (and hence the reader), have, for the latter half of the book, misunderstood the significance of one of Ash's key mementoes.

I mean, just to rattle off a few: feminism, post-modernism, living in a post-modern world, deconstructionism, many many issues of religion and spirituality, cultural relativism and archetypes, living in a globalized world, negotiating the self in relationships, the academic life and petty infighting, etc, etc. e., that the common masses have received an education sufficient to understand the higher thinking of Literature. Roland saw her black silk skirts, her velvet trains, sweeping compressed between the Fathers of the Church, and heard her firm foot ring on metal among the German poets.

She fled to France to deliver her baby and then gave her daughter to her sister to raise as her own. But it was just possible that Ash's own Vico had marginalia missed even by the indefatigable Cropper. And as well as the layers of fictional biography, and wondering who is speaking on whose behalf, literal ventriloquism is a recurring theme, there is a seance, and there is even po-mo musing in this po-mo book, when Roland considers “partly with precise postmodernist pleasure, and partly with a real element of superstitious dread, that he and Maud were being driven by a plot or fate that seemed, at least possibly, to be not their plot or fate but that of those others.

The happiness project got put on the back burner until I was ready to emerge from the Victorian melancholia, which placed demands on my time too great to allow for preparing meals. They were both letters in Ash's flowing hand, both headed with his Great Russell Street address and dated June 21st. That is the title of (fictional) Mortimer Cropper’s famous biography of (fictional) RHA, described in the quote at the top), but it applies to Byatt, too. An interesting and at least as important theme is that on the female condition and feminism, now and then.This involves a flashback to the Victorian era in which Ash comes across his and LaMotte's daughter as a young girl. This book is a double story: it is the story of Randolph Ash and Christabel LaMotte, two 19th century poets who defy their circumstances and the times to have an affair of the heart, the mind and the body. There are little puzzles and clues throughout the entire novel, most of them residing within the poetry sections. He could not identify the Fairy Topic, either, and this gave him a not uncommon sensation of his own huge ignorance, a grey mist, in which floated or could be discerned odd glimpses of solid objects, odd bits of glitter of domes or shadows of roofs in the gloom. That is the shit that started me down this path in the first place, that lead me to make choice after choice that I thought was going there, even if it went somewhere different.