#17. Nominated For The Booker Prize – Possession by A S Byatt (Audible)

I purchased this Audible book in February 2021. I found it tedious to listen to, despite the wonderful narration of actor Samuel West, and I stopped listening after the first few chapters thinking I’d try again “when I was in the mood.” At nearly 22 hours long, I couldn’t find the enthusiasm to listen to it.  I noticed that this title crept slowly to the bottom of my list as I continued to buy and listen to other titles which I found infinitely more engaging within the first few minutes of listening to them. 

When I read the blurb, I thought I had been buying an edgy detective novel, but this is a detective work more akin to family history research than a “who dunnit” murder mystery!  As I was looking for titles that had been nominated for the Booker Prize, I remembered that I still had this book to listen to and not only had it been nominated, but it had also won the prize, so it must have something going for it. 

Indeed, the book is cleverly constructed, and I found Sam West read it beautifully, however, it is a book full of beautiful prose and poetry and it is challenging to listen to and remember what’s going on.  If I need to sit and concentrate on a book, then my first choice is a paperback and this is a book you need to concentrate on, and perhaps flick the pages back and forth to remind you of events or look at things again in detail. You can't do this with an audio book and so my experience of the book fell a little short, but I still enjoyed it! 

“Winner of England's Booker Prize 1990.

 Possession is an exhilarating novel of wit and romance, at once a literary detective novel and a triumphant love story. It is the tale of a pair of young scholars researching the lives of two Victorian poets.

 Following a trail of  letters, journals and poems, they uncover a web of passion, deceit and tragedy, and their quest becomes a battle against time.”

Roland Michell is a literary researcher who has recently completed his PhD studying the eminent (fictitious) Victorian poet Randolph Henry Ash. He is frustrated that he cannot find himself a permanent job, however, whilst in a London library, he discovers, hidden in the back of a book that once belonged to Ash, two draft handwritten letters to an unknown woman. Excited by this discovery, he secretes these letters with his personal belongings before returning the book to the librarian. Michell suspects that Ash must have been having an affair and begins to delve deeper to unearth who the letters were meant for. His knowledge of Ash leads him to theorise that the letters were intended for a contemporary of Ash, a minor poet named Christabel LaMotte.

Dr Maud Bailey is both a distant relative and scholar of Christabel LaMotte and Michell arranges to meet her in Lincoln to discuss his hypothesis.  Maud shows him some additional documents which show a likely correspondence took place between the two poets around 1858/59. It would be a significant find for the academics if Ash and LaMotte had been having an affair, as it had been widely understood that Ash was happily married, and LaMotte was probably a lesbian. Michell admits to Maud about the letters he has stolen, whilst she confirms she is intrigued and wants to find out more about the affair. Any academic who managed to discover the truth about the relationship would bolster their career, so Maud and Roland try to keep their research secret; but hot on their heels are another group of scholars including James Blackadder, and American scholars Mortimer Cropper and Leonora Stern, thus much excitement and underhand activities follow in the pursuit of the truth.

Troubled Blood – Robert Galbraith (JK Rowling)

2020, the year of constant surprises. I’ve never been a huge JK Rowling fan (I mean her books, not the person.  I’ve never met the woman so I can’t comment on her personally, unlike the Twitter dunderheads who like to misconstrue everything they read.) I have to give her credit for her vivid imagination and her wealth of knowledge and the amount of research she must undertake before putting pen to paper, but for me, her writing is prone to too much repetition which detracts from what could be an excellent read.

So why do I read the Strike books if I’m not a fan of her writing? Easy. Tom Burke plays the lead in the TV adaptations and with it he has brought an interesting, complex character to life, one full of charm, charisma, and sparkle. I’ve become invested in the character; I want to know what the next instalment is about and what the future holds for Strike. So, for me to keep up with Strike, and to not feel like I’m wasting any of my day, I turned to Audible books for both Lethal White and Troubled Blood. This way I could go for a walk or do chores and “read” at the same time.

As the orotund voice of Robert Glenister began permeating my ears, I realised that the format of this book was to be the same as the others. Each chapter to be preceded by a quotation…this time it was Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queen. I hit pause, puzzled. It rang a distant bell in my memory and so I trotted over to the bookcase and pulled out my battered Norton’s Anthology of English Literature. Ah yes…there it was…battered and having obviously seen all of its 25 years of service, there was the page marker for Edmund Spencer, and more importantly the Cantos of The Fairey Queen. Forgetting I was supposed to be listening to Strikes adventures, I started pouring over the old verses and the associated notes I’d scribbled throughout the margins. 

Chekov or Hemingway?

Anyone familiar with Chekov will undoubtedly remember his principal “If in Act One you have a pistol hanging on the wall, then it must fire in the last act.” As we enter Strikes world for the fifth time, we find him in Cornwall, visiting his terminally ill aunt, and catching up with his oldest friend Dave Polworth in the pub. The question of marriage arises, and in the defence of marriage, Polworth quotes from another Russian literary giant, Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina.  With Strike coming back to his childhood “home” Cornwall and all the people he loved there, Robin dealing with a long and acrimonious divorce, and Strike’s ex Charlotte causing him no end of emotional reckoning, surely the poignant quote must have a bearing by the end of the novel. Or is JKR following Hemingway, whereby inconsequential details are just part of the plot?

In a departure for Strike and Robin, they take on the 40-year-old cold case of a doctor who mysteriously vanished one night. The client gives Strike a year to solve the case, and what a year it will be for both Cormoran and Robin. Many of the original witnesses for the case are dead, and for those still alive, how accurate will their memory of events be? Looking through the notes of the original chief detective on the case, it was apparent he was suffering with his mental health. Were his notes a sign of madness, or was there something more to his readings of tarot and astrological charts?

Lethal White by Robert Galbraith (Kindle)

Before the release of "Lethal White" Robert Galbraith/J K Rowling posted various teasers on Twitter. Headers showed a wooden anatomical horse (used by artists for form and perspective drawing) a Benjamin West painting titled “Death on a Pale Horse” and a picture of a USB stick in the shape of a white horse. All of these posts convinced me Lethal White would be set within the confines of the equestrian world. I love all things equestrian and assumed the book would somehow be connected to the medical condition found in white horses.

Overo lethal white syndrome is a fatal, inherited condition found in horse breeds with white coat patterns. It is probably most renowned in the American Paint Horse, but can also be found in miniature horses, Thoroughbred and part-Arab horses. The affected foals are born with a white (or nearly pure white) coat due to a lack of melanin-producing cells, plus an impaired intestinal tract. At birth they look like any normal white foal (not all whites foals are affected by OLWS) however as the infected foals cannot digest food properly down the intestinal tract, once they start to drink the mare’s milk they start showing signs of severe colic. An affected foal can usually show signs within the first 12 hours of birth and death can occur with 48 hours as the abdomen distends and becomes increasingly painful. There is no cure for OLWS and so the kindest thing is for the foal to be euthanised.

It seemed odd to name a book after such a horrendous condition, but then the promotional material about Lethal White was released. "I seen a kid killed…He strangled it, up by the horse.”  OK, so not a story set in the horse world at all…up by the horse could be anything. A pub (there are a lot of pubs called The White Horse) or perhaps a famous British landmark…a chalk horse (there are plenty of them cut into British hillsides…from the Kilburn White Horse in the North York Moors National Park, to the Westbury White Horse of Wiltshire and beyond.) There was only one way to find out…read it! 

The first thing I noticed was that each chapter starts with an excerpt from Henrik Ibsen’s Rosmersholm.  Ibsen's politically biased play covered scandal, corruption and an unhappy marriage (the characters in the play were based on the real life elopement of a fiesty young countess who ran off with the husband of one her relatives.) One of the themes in the play is the folklore of the White Horses of Rosmersholm.  The play was originally written under the title White Horses and later changed to Rosmersholm, so it was a tangible use of his work in her book.

Now I don’t intend to spoil the book for those who have not read it by writing spoilers. The book starts where we left off in the last one, at Robin’s wedding. Whilst there is no hard and fast rule as to how long a prologue should be, I think it should be limited to no more than five pages. It opens up a story, giving background details and context, and helps establish the story going forward. Now when I finished Career of Evil, I was desperate to know what happened between Robin, Strike and Matthew, but I wasn’t expecting a warts and all start to the book. I read the (very) long prologue thinking, “well this is all very nice…but is this supposed to be romantic fiction or a detective novel…and when are we going to move onto the actual novel?” 

It took too long for the book to really get started…it was a very slow burn and it wasn’t until I’d got to about the 24^th or 25^th chapter that I actually thought the book took off. Strike’s success in a Career of Evil has meant that his agency has grown and he is able to employ some contract staff to assist him with investigations. He receives a visit from a young man, Billy Knight, who claims he witnessed a murder and the burial of someone when he was younger. He’s an agitated character with a history of mental illness, and he runs from Strike’s office before identifying himself. Strike however catches up with Billy’s brother Jimmy, an activist opposed to the up and coming 2012 London Olympics, who tells Strike his brother is an unreliable person and not to be believed.

The meeting of Jimmy and Strike is seen by Jasper Chiswell – the Minister for Culture – a politician plagued by scandal who, he tells Strike, is being blackmailed by Jimmy. Strike takes up the case and places Robin undercover at Westminster to find out what is going on behind closed doors. Robin, unsurprisingly, is not having the best of times with Matthew, and so is eager to accept her latest assignment. She meets a number of characters including Geraint Winn, the husband of the Minister for Sport (Della Winn) who wishes to destroy Jasper’s career…however, whilst undercover, Robin finds out that there are other things he’s guilty of. The plot weaves back and forth through a myriad of characters which we are introduced to in Rowling’s distinctly verbose style. As the investigation continues, Strike is drawn to a painting, of a horse mourning the death of her foal. 

By the end of the book I was full of mixed emotions. I enjoyed being reacquainted with Strike and Robin. JKR has created two beguiling characters that you can’t help falling in love with. I enjoy a good crime/detective novel, and in essence these books do have a skilfully weaved storyline but I just wish there was tighter editing. All characters, including incidental characters, are described in so much detail that the flow of the story wanes. 

I felt that JKR was distracted when writing the book, there is repetition in some areas and mistakes in others, and I found it unnecessary to keep describing Strike’s missing leg in so much detail so many times. We’re led to believe that Strike is not defined by his injury, yet at every given opportunity a paragraph will be given to how he lost his leg. For an audience with the intellectual capabilities of processing a passage of Rosmersholm per chapter, the author should trust the same audience to remember (if you tell them once per novel) how Strike sustained his injury. As the story progresses it is perfectly acceptable to say the pain shot down Strike’s leg as an adequate reflection of when he is suffering, rather than the pain shot down Strike’s missing leg which he had sustained…blah blah blah. The constant reminders were irritating and distracting.

JKR is blessed with a vivid imagination and an ability to create a good story. She creates interesting, complex characters and has a great feel for the human psyche; she is also very visual and this translates well to film and TV, however her publisher really needs to be brave and cut the extraneous material. The various flaws (e.g. an item mysteriously changing into something else) should also be ironed out when proofreading because they stand out, particularly if you read the book over two days.

Despite my grumbles, I did enjoy the book! I’m looking forward to the TV adaptation and I have a great desire to find out what happens in the next stage of Robin and Strike’s journey. I just hope that we might get to see some more of Shanker in book 5…I do like him.

Genre: Mystery, Thriller, Crime, Detective

Release Date: 18^th September 2018

Publisher: Sphere (Kindle)

Pages: 657

 “Disclosure: If you buy books linked to this site, I may earn a small commission from Bookshop.org, whose fees support independent bookshops, at no extra cost to you.”