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Imposture

Benjamin Markovits Faber / 208pp. / £10.99

Review by Susanna Hislop

BENJAMINMarkovits’ latest novel takes as its inspiration an intrigue close to the heart of this publication: that heady summer of 1816 in which, imprisoned in the Villa Diodati by the bad weather, Byron, his occasional lover Claire Clairmont, Percy Shelley and Mary Wollstonecraft spent a week composing ghost stories on the shores of Lake Geneva. The particular focus is the lesser known work that that infamous summer – the one which gave birth to Frankenstein– produced: the macabre novella ‘The Vampyre’. Originally attributed to Byron, ‘The Vampyre’ was in fact the work of John Polidori. Taken into Lord Byron’s service at the tender age of twenty, Polidori, the eldest son of a distinguished Italian scholar, was appointed his private physician. Accompanying Byron into exile in Europe, Polidori found himself amidst the not entirely sympathetic company of the various literary and aristocratic households his master frequented. Indeed, as Byron’s friend Thomas Moore wrote, he was the “constant butt for Byron’s sarcasm and merriment”. After just a few months, Byron dismissed his doctor. “Our tempers did not agree”, Polidori wrote to his father. Yet amidst their “continued series

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of slight quarrels”, the men also formed a real intimacy. It is the bittersweet memory of this painful relationship, and the literary child it bore (Polidori developed ‘The Vamprye’ from a fragment of narrative Byron abandoned) that form the backdrop to Imposture. The novel finds its protagonist back in London. Three years have elapsed since he was dismissed from Byron’s service, and Poliodori has fallen deep into a quagmire of unemployment, poverty and despair. Lonely and dejected, he is plagued by a sense of profound humiliation at both the failure of his literary ambitions, and the embarrassing reality of his professional incompetence:

Sometimes he counted over all the people that he had killed. Lord Byron’s line often ran through his head: ‘Polidori’s patients could never want a better doctor. They were all dead’.

We meet our hero standing in the soaking rain of Soho, banging on the unresponsive red door of Henry Colburn, Bookseller. The savvy-minded Colburn has just published ‘The Vampyre’ in his New Monthly Magazine, falsely attributing it to Lord Byron. The work has caused an absolute sensation, and the hungry public rush to buy copies. Trailing behind this literary bloodthirst, our unlikely heroine, the mousy Eliza Esmond, finds herself on the publisher’s doorstep. Despite Polidori’s sodden and dishevelled appearance, he still exudes the air of a faded dandy, “like a prodigal returning only to find that his threadbare suit, carefully, proudly preserved, has long since fallen out of style”; and with his dark curls and boyish charms is mistaken for the very man whose success and fame precluded his own. So begins Markovits’ gothic romance. In a series of deceptions and impostures (for Eliza herself is not quite the sophisticated girl she pretends to be), the narrative interweaves their burgeoning love story with Polidori’s reminiscences of Byron.

Just as Polidori’s one chance at personal happiness rests on a mistaken identity he must preserve, so too his one chance at literary fame depends on the uncovering of that identity. This is a novel about living in someone’s shadow. About frustrated ambitions, failure and mediocracy, in the face of success, fame and blazing talent. “The force of impossible comparisons”, as Polidori’s father puts it damningly. Anyone who has ever been employed by or fallen in love with an artist will recognise with amusement and sadness much of Polidori’s alternately enamoured and disgusted portrayal of Lord Byron. And playing on all those delicious themes of the vampire tradition – imposture, incest, seduction, abuse – Markovits finds at the heart of it a painful truth about the creative spirit:

he understood something of the burden great men thrust upon their companions; something of the patience, the simplicity of character, the easy confidence necessary to carry the weight of another man’s arrogance...he felt, in their presence, the blood drain from him, his life-blood thinning away.

If I have focused on the author’s literary conceits, here perhaps is where the slight fault of the book lies. At times the story, and particularly the prose (surely there are some more synonyms for imposture, posture and pose...), struggles under the weight of its own creation, and its merit lies too much in his highly inventive adaptation of literary history. Yet Markovits is an acutely observant writer of human emotion, and he has translated these characters of literary legend with intelligence, sensitivity and compassion, to create a moving novel of modern sensibility. Most of all, he betrays a deeply felt empathy for that heart-rending figure, the failed Romantic, not least in the luminously written prologue, a gripping story of contemporary imposture that forms the final intertextual twist to his tale. . .

Susanna Hislop is an actress and writer living in London.
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Virgin of the Flames

Chris Abani Jonathan Cape / 292pp / £12.99

Review by Nii Ayikwei Parkes

WHENChris Abani’s novel Graceland appeared in 2004, it was acclaimed as his ‘debut’, which told us ‘Africans’ something very important about the publishing industry: what happens in Africa doesn’t actually matter. In fact, Abani had already published a book, Master of the Board, in 1983 (as a precocious 16 year-old), which revealed his bent for fantastic plotlines and big characters, and led to the first of his many arrests in Nigeria for “masterminding” a coup. He went on to publish another novel, Sirocco, in 1987 before fleeing to London, New York and, subsequently, Los Angeles, where his latest work, The Virgin of Flames, is set. In locating the new novel in East LA, with no detours to Africa, Abani achieves a freedom few African-born writers can, although he is careful to maintain some African links in the form of Bomboy Dickens, the illegal immigrant and wealthy Rwandan butcher (it can only be tongue-in-cheek), and Black, the protagonist, who is of Salvadorean and Nigerian extraction. The story is told with the whisper of the imprisoned Los Angeles River, with an undercurrent of religious, mythological and literary references, giving it a mildly surreal texture.

In Black, Abani has created a character more troubled than Kurt Cobain, more conflicted than Prince and as quirky as Andy Warhol, and it is the protagonist’s destructive trajectory of self-discovery and his pursuit of transsexual stripper Sweet Girl, that drives this novel. However, Abani’s great achievement is the Los Angeles he paints, a “rambling maze” that never tires of “reinventing itself”, the eeking out of ‘ordinary’ LA denizens, characters and situations as weird as the half-men,

“In Black, Abani has created a character more troubled than Kurt Cobain, more conflicted than Prince and as quirky as Andy Warhol”

spirits and succubi that Ben Okri’s Azaro encounters in Madam Koto’s bar in The Famished Road. He revels in the darkness of the city, taking the reader to strip joints, fast-food stops, whorehouses, dog fights in abandoned warehouses and the strip in Alvarado, where one – in this case, Bomboy – can buy a whole new identity, and where the man who does the deal melts “away so fast that the only proof he had ever been there was Bomboy’s inky thumb”. Abani lays out the canvas of Black’s life as a guerrilla mural artist with an obsession for the Virgin Mary, dating back to a dark history of abuse at the hands of his mother when his Nigerian father goes MIA in Vietnam. The author draws us into the worlds of RayRay, the dwarf junkie barista on stilts,

and Iggy, a lapsed Jewish tattoo artist with steel loops under her skin and mismatched eyes. We also briefly encounter the hooker who, when high, recites verse from Twelfth Night, and “the man pulling the purple wooden life-size donkey mounted on wheels down Cesar Chavez, wearing a nonchalant expression as though it was the most normal thing in the world”. The language is frequently free-flowing and poetic, and most chapters end with an evocative image, but Abani also proves at times to have co-opted some of Walter Mosley’s powers of pithy description, with which he illuminates characters such as this one, hiding in the shadows of Charlie’s, a strip bar: “a thin rake of a man whose eyes held all the fire his body couldn’t”. The Virgin of Flames is by no means a flawless book. While it delights in conjuring outrageous and elaborate tales –like that of Tomáás Alarcóón, a ruthless immigration lawyer who, after seeing an apparition of The Virgin, stops charging for services and goes broke, only to keep his office because the Chinese landlord won’t evict him for fear of “the black burn” in his eyes – there are moments of overindulgence. The mural piece ‘American Gothic – The Remix’, which Black scribbles in The Ugly Store Caféé (owned by Iggy), must be one of the most contrived pieces of art in fiction. Also, Abani, like many of the great yarn spinners who are more attuned to the art of telling than showing, has weak dialogue in many places – especially in the childhood flashbacks when Black talks to his father – and this reviewer became increasingly sensitive to the overuse of the words ‘concrete’ and ‘lip’ as the book progressed. Nevertheless, the flaws are not so many as to make the reader lose interest; like the city he describes so lovingly, Abani absorbs these minor blips in the grandness of his ambition, and never forgets to entertain.

Nii Ayikwei Parkes is a poet and novelist, and a Contributing Editor of The Liberal.

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