Childish Loves (review)

This is the third of Markovits’s trilogy of Byronic biofictions, following Imposture (2007), which fictionalised the story of Polidori’s ‘The Vampyre’ and the young doctor’s temptation to masquerade as the famous poet himself, and A Quiet Adjustment (2008), which gave us Annabella’s Henry Jamesian-style account of the Byron marriage. The third novel returns, as it were with a vengeance, to the original framing narrative used in the first volume: to a fictional obsessive American Romanticist (re)named Peter Pattieson who is said to have written these novelistic reconstructions of Byron’s life.

In this third novel Pattieson (now referred to by his birth name of Sullivan), although now presented as firmly dead, in a sense comes to life far more than he does in either of the previous volumes. There he was little more than a pretext who could be blamed for any awkward inaccuracies in the presentation of Byron’s life or times. Here he becomes the main subject for the novelist’s attention, and some two-thirds of the book is dedicated to the narrator’s detective-like pursuit of the ‘truth’ of whether or not Sullivan had a paederastic relationship with one of his students. This situation is partly reflected in the other one-third of the book, which purports to be excerpts (faked by Sullivan) from Byron’s journal, relating particularly to his early sexual initiation and relationships. Rather than being seen through the eyes of others (Polidori’s or Lady Byron’s) this fictional Byron is now allowed to give his own account of his youth and his sexual development, which may or may not throw light on Sullivan’s own motivations, tastes and actions.

The novelist himself is also fictionalised as the narrator, with biographical and psychological characteristics that may or may not be Markovits’s own, and it is appropriate that, both in the novel and in talking about his work, Markovits should draw attention to the influence of Philip Roth, the master of the author-as-narrator genre. Such a tortuously convoluted narrative-within-a-narrative and the blurring of the dividing line between fact and fiction, narrated and narrator, memoir and novel is, of course, also particularly apposite to Byron’s work. Markovits has indicated elsewhere that one of his intentions was to imagine how Byron might have operated in the literary genre of prose fiction that he experimented with briefly (in ‘Augustus Darvell’, for example) but – surprisingly for such an avid reader of novels – did not sustain.

Childish Loves is a highly readable, involving and entertaining novel, and its concept, its structure and its manipulation of the reader’s expectations of discovering ‘truth’ are all nicely executed and sustained. But, for Byronists, in the end, the success of Markovits’s project will be judged on the authenticity of the passages that purport to be in Byron’s voice. Whether presented as Byron’s, Sullivan’s, the narrator’s or Markovits’s own it cannot unfortunately be said that these succeed in imitating Byron’s style or in imaginatively recreating his historical milieu. The suspension of our disbelief is compromised by prose that retains distracting twenty-first-century Americanisms (‘the Reverend Becher’ for example), by inaccuracies such as making John Eddleston two years older (rather than younger) than Byron, by the appearance of gentlemen with Victorian beards in a clean-shaven Georgian setting and by a hot, cloudless and windless Nottinghamshire that often sounds more like Texas than England.