A Son of the Rock

Chatto & Windus, 1990, 517 p

Insecure academic Roland Michell finds in a pile of unsifted-through papers relating to Victorian poet Randolph Henry Ash unfinished drafts of a letter from Ash to a hitherto unknown possible female lover, a relationship which would overturn the prevailing view of Ash’s life.  For reasons obscure even to himself Michell removes the drafts from the pile and resolves to investigate further. He begins to suspect the intended recipient was the female poet Christabel LaMotte and enlists the help of LaMotte expert Dr Maud Bailey to delve into the mystery. With her help he comes across a complete set of letters between the two poets which reveal the extent of their affair.

There are several other academics interested in Ash – Fergus Wolff, Mortimer Cropper, James Blackadder – one of whom has obsessively obtained items belonging to Ash for his Stant Collection and would pay a large sum for such letters.

All this is set against a background of the present-day circumstances of Michell and Bailey.

This set up allows Byatt to deliver to us examples of the poetry of both Ash and LaMotte as well as a frankly tedious laying out of their letters to each other in their entirety. While these are all accomplished pieces of literary ventriloquy on Byatt’s part (and of which some would arguably be necessary) they do not help to advance the plot by much. I note that in Babel Tower she did something analogous with an internal story written by one of the characters in the main narrative.

Among all this there is an explanation in dialogue of the arcana of copyright law as regards letters between the writer and the recipient – or their descendants.

Byatt is here playing games with the reader and with literary critics. At one point, “Roland thought, 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.” It strikes me that having a character think that s/he is being manipulated by an external force is laying it on a bit thick and also tends to haul the reader out of the narrative, destroying suspension of disbelief.

Byatt’s intentions with the sentences contained in, “He was in a Romance, a vulgar and a high Romance simultaneously ….. a Romance was one of the systems that controlled him, as the expectations of Romance control almost everyone in the Western world, for better or worse, at some point or another,” are more forgiveable, being more general.

In an example of the pathetic fallacy writ large there is a scene taking place during the so-called Great Storm of 1988 where Blackadder and Cropper attempt to remove illicitly from Ash’s grave a box containing further correspondence between the poets. (This is also an explicit reference to an incident in the lives of the Pre-Raphaelites.)

What the book is really about though is the impossibility of knowing the full intricacies of people’s lives from their letters or artistic works, no matter how comprehensive their scholars’ knowledge of them might be.

Illustrating this, and divorced from the rest of the text, are several passages with straightforward narrative depictions of Ash and LaMotte either together or at significant moments of their connected lives. Crucially, these feel real, felt experiences.

Fiction gets to the nub; biography does not.

Pedant’s corner:- woud (would,) an extraneous end quote mark, focussed (focused,) gas-mantels (gas mantles.) “Roderick Random, an English work,” (Roderick Random may have been written in English but its writer, Tobias Smollett, was a Scot,) “as though she was liquid” (should that not be ‘as though she were liquid’?) wistaria (wisteria,) “snuck off” (USian, the British phrase is ‘sneaked off’,) “the sound of the Mercedes’ angry purr” (Mercedes’s,) scarey (scary.)