The Wicked Lord Byron: A Novel by Richard Deakin (review)

It is April 1824. In the dank, marshy town of Missolonghi in Greece, and with the Greek rebellion against Ottoman rule escalating in the surrounding countryside, Lord Byron lies dying from a combination of fever and excessive bleeding by over-zealous physicians. In the poet’s very final moments, however, his spirit separates from his still conscious body, and begins a sardonic review of a life that was certainly eventful, if perhaps not always ‘well lived’ in the conventional sense of that phrase. Together the two poles of Byron’s personality – meant loosely to correspond to the stylish but cynical dandy (Spirit) and the more empathetic, suffering ordinary man (Body) – revisit the key scenes and episodes which shaped the poet’s life and through which his destiny unfolded. Not least, they meditate on the core friendships and relationships in Byron’s life: with his mother and half-sister Augusta, with his wife Annabella (and innumerable other lovers, both male and female), and with friends such as John Cam Hobhouse, Scrope Davies and later Shelley.

This scenario – an inventive variation on the ‘his-life-flashed-before-him’ trope – is the starting premise of Richard Deakin’s energetic and often entertaining retelling of Byron’s life. The principal narrator, as we move more or less chronologically through Byron’s biography, is the cynical Spirit, for whom Deakin has fashioned quite a compelling, plausible voice, replete with upper-class Regency idioms: this is an effective vehicle especially for the more ribald or bawdy aspects of Byron’s life, and there are some memorable scenes here of drunkenness and youthful high jinks. It is less successful, however, at capturing Byron the poet, who must surely have sometimes had his mind on higher things and who was certainly capable of articulating himself with sensitivity and lyricism. This is of course a common problem with fictions and films about writers, artists and similar figures: while their biographies can be easily sketched in terms of major events, it is well-nigh impossible to adequately convey the creative processes, and the complex intersection of craft and distinctive vision, that underpin their core claim to fame. The Wicked Lord Byron undoubtedly struggles in this regard, and the early Byron, the poet of Childe Harold I and II, to my mind comes across here as a bit of a boor. However, Deakin does make a valiant attempt to vary his narrator’s register through some skilful inter-weaving of passages from Byron’s own letters and journals, and in the latter stages of the novel especially, a richer, more complex portrait of the protagonist begins to emerge. In these sections the novel’s original conceit, that of a dialogue between the core aspects of Byron’s personality, largely falls away. But the switch to a more conventional narrative mode is I think to the novel’s advantage, and the closing chapters paint an often moving picture of an aging Byron, weighed down by past losses and mistakes and by mounting responsibilities: particularly effective here, I felt, is the poet’s growing realisation not only that the Greek cause needs some sort of grand symbolic gesture or sacrifice but that he himself is fated to be that sacrifice.

Overall, then, The Wicked Lord Byron is a commendable addition to the long and extensive tradition of fictional and filmic renderings of the poet’s life. It may lack profundity in some places, yet it undoubtedly shares with its protagonist considerable energy and zest.