I owed a lot to Umberto Eco. (P 'Introduction') Byatt uses the third-person omniscient narrator in the novel, but most of the novel covers Ash and LaMotte's letters, excerpts from Ash's poems and short stories, parts of LaMotte's epic poem The Fairy Melusine, and fairy tales. Also includes Mortimer Cropper's biography of Ash, excerpts from the diaries of Blanche Glover, Sabine de Kercoz, and Ash's wife Ellen, and the writings of other characters. It is a self-reflexive novel set in intertwined texts and at the same time a critique of postmodernism under the structure of postmodernism. According to Alexa Alfer and Amy J. Edwards de Campos: Its rigorous yet mocking imitation of both Victorian and contemporary philosophies, genres, and styles, its abundance of narrative parody and pastiche, and its shamelessly ostentatious parallels between history and time all serve to place foreground foundational questions of narrative playfulness and (meta-)historical representation and suggest a strong – if perhaps suspiciously brazen – fidelity to the critical ideas about narrative, history and identity so fashionable in the late 1990s 80 and early years ’90..