Books - Possession

I can't decide whether I enjoyed this book or am intensely irritated by it. It is a book of halves, with two romances running parallel to one aother; one historical and one modern. The problem I had in reading it is that I found one pair of characters thoroughly engaging, while the other pair was strangely unsympathetic and tedious. I caught myself plodding through the historical portions, which came to feel increasingly like a weak storyline in a soap opera, flicking ahead through the pages to find out how much more I had to read before the modern part resumed. Having said that, the bits that are good really are very good, and some of the poetry and stories which Byatt writes on behalf of La Motte and Ash are utterly beautiful and enchanting. It's just unfortunate that the characters' motivation and dialogue is weak. The modern pairing of Maud and Roland is much stronger, although the caricatured and one-dimensional supporting cast is both distracting and annoying. On the whole I'm glad I persisted with it, but don't think I would fight my way through it a second time.