books: Details, details, details!
James Calhoun, The Peak

In 1990, A.S. Byatt won the Booker Prize for her popular, massive novel Possession, a tale of literary intrigue involving two scholars that are each obsessed with a poet from the Victorian era, and discover, while falling in love with each other, that the two were actually lovers. It is an interesting, if over-long read. The book is strewn with the poems of these two fictional Victorian poets that Byatt has no doubt taken great pains to write with a sense of authenticity. However, after awhile they become tedious. Possession is essentially a mystery/romance novel, albeit, an extremely literary one, but I must admit I'm a fan of neither genre.

Byatt's latest, The Biographer's Tale is much of the same. If you liked Possession you'll like The Biographer's Tale, for it is basically a pared-down version of its predecessor. The story follows a disaffected grad student named Phineas - a tribute to John Knowles' A Separate Peace or perhaps a reference to Greek mythology - who decides to track down the mysterious history of a literary figure named Scholes Destry-Scholes who apparently disappeared in the infamous maelstrom while researching a new book. Phineas then stumbles upon some forgotten papers that belonged to Destry-Scholes and attempts to piece them together.

Apparently the papers were sketches for a series of biographies dealing with Henrik Ibsen, Carl Linnaeus and Francis Galton, the cousin of Charles Darwin, and a big believer in eugenics in an era when it was okay to believe in it. With meticulous and often tedious detail, we work our way through each piece of paper as Phineas comes across it. We are inundated by details of beetles and bees and the history of eugenics and safaris in Africa, and other such arcana. Byatt has clearly done a superfluous amount of research and it shows - every other sentence is a reference to something else. But, I couldn't help asking myself, why bother?

I couldn't help but wish that Byatt had instead followed the same strategy as Martin Amis for her fictional creations. In his novel The Information, Amis' protagonist writes a book called Untitled which, apparently, rivals Finnegan's Wake for complexity, and drives the few that read it mad.

Amis never gives us so much of a sentence of this fictional novel, thankfully. In Byatt's book, the detail was too excessive and barely relevant to the plot.

The frustrating thing is that the story of Phineas is really quite interesting, as he fumbles along with history and biography and women. But, the critic in Byatt seemingly won't let any detail go unexhausted and Phineas, like Destry-Scholes, drowns in the maelstrom of Byatt's story.

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