As part of my Greek shadow journey (for which I adopted an "Englishmen in Greece" theme), I've been revisiting the life of that famous English Hellenophile, Lord Byron.

Benjamin Markovits's Imposture fits in well here. It's the first novel in his Byron trilogy, and although I was hesitant at first, by the end I was a total convert, and definitely plan to read the other two (just not yet, because I have lots of Turkish literature coming up next).

Imposture, as all the reviewers emphasize, is "a story within a story". So we start off with an account of how the author allegedly came by the manuscript that is to follow (namely, via a colleague with a mysterious past, who is a Byron scholar, and turns out to be using an assumed name).

The central character is John William Polidori, the young doctor who accompanied Byron on his second major European trip. When they arrived at Lake Geneva, where Mary Shelley (then still Mary Godwin) and Percy Bysshe Shelley also resided, the group was forced by inclement weather to spend much of its time indoors. So they took on a project to write ghost stories.

Mary Shelley's Frankenstein is the best-known product of this endeavour. But it also produced a book called The Vampyre (the main action of which takes place outside Athens). When this story first appeared it was assumed to be by Byron (a supposition the publisher did little to counter, given the runaway sales that Byron's name guaranteed). Actually, however, it was by Polidori (as Byron freely acknowledged).

So... we have an author (Markovits) posing as another author (Sullivan), who goes by the name of Pattieson (the purported author of Walter Scott's Waverley novels). Pattieson/Sullivan has written a series of novels on Byron's life, supposedly in the style "of Byron's times".

Still with me?


(All the photos in this post, by the way, come from our visit to Newstead Abbey, Byron's ancestral home, in 2018.)







Polidori looks so like Byron that he is often mistaken for him -- which is exactly what happens in Chapter 1, when book-loving Eliza Esmond finds Polidori banging on the door of Henry Colburn, bookseller and publisher, to press his rights over The Vampyre. She has met him already, she says, at a ball. Polidori goes along with the mistake, and over the course of the rest of the book, fails to extricate himself from it.

Eliza is also conducting her own minor bit of subterfuge. It was not she, but her sister, who had met Byron all those years ago. It was Eliza, however, having heard her sister's story, who stole out in the cold light of dawn to see him leave. What she doesn't know at the time is that the man she actually sees at that time is Polidori.

The story follows the now entwined lives of these two impostors, right to the bitter end. Concurrently, it flashes back to Polidori's journey with Byron, filling in exactly how the vain, unstable, jealous Polidori comes to be increasingly hollowed out by Byron's presence.

Polidori does come across as one of those people who never quite get themselves sorted. He has "a deeply felt intuition, that he lived outside the world, at the wrong end of things. His touch was negative; it created absence." This depresses him. Yet: "Polidori had no gift for misery. He tended to make himself ridiculous, which struck him in any case as much worse. Absurdity afflicted him instead: Sorrow's cousin once removed, its poor relation."

With a character like this, it is unsurprising that Byron's proximity -- as Polidori's father warns -- ends up draining the young doctor: "Byron had such a persuasive manner. Whatever he felt, very rich in colour, seemed to stain everything around him, everyone. Whenever Polidori uttered a word, one heard the soft echo of inattention."

Polidori becomes obsessed by his more powerful, more successful look-alike. When Byron is away, the doctor tries to become him -- dressing up in his clothes, climbing in between his sheets, reading his correspondence. Polidori, unlike Eliza, will not recognize his "place", and therefore constantly draws rebuffs upon himself. Byron is kind in many ways, but very cruel in others. He, like Polidori, has a vain and demanding nature, but -- because he has fame and money and status -- he doesn't suffer so much for it.

I loved Markovits's writing. He conveys this web of complex relationships sparingly but powerfully, never lingering too long to make a point.

He conjures up the pinched world of Eliza Esmond equally beautifully. Her position in the Walmsley household is somewhere between low-status friend and servant. She has a bed under the eaves with a window she has to kneel to see out of, and she uses the back stairs. She is thrown into greater relief by her socially more advanced sister, Beatrice, whose "sensible" approach to life contrasts with Eliza's reputation as "a girl who made things up, who lived, privately and powerfully, in the court of her own imagination". But there's a business-like practicality to Eliza, too. Having fallen in love with Polidori-as-Byron, she realizes that you can recognize the state of being in love "by the little cold ticking of calculation in your thoughts: perhaps I can change my life".

The almost spooky climax of the imposture comes in the coach to Brighton, when Polidori, still playing the role of Byron, gives her a searing account of himself, the doctor. The self-loathing is almost too hard to bear: Polidori (says Polidori-as-Byron) "had a kind of foolishness that turned everything it touched into nonsense. How he made me laugh! His chief talent, I once told him, was in making himself ridiculous. Putting himself in the wrong."







By the time Polidori is ready to step out of his role (in response to Eliza's admission that she had coopted the story of her sister's dance with Byron), Eliza has staked everything, and cannot forgive the deviousness to which she has fallen victim.

The novel ends tragically, as Polidori's real life did. What becomes of poor deceived Eliza we don't find out.

In amongst all the psychology, there's a strong socioeconomic dimension, too: "Markovits renders, like Fitzgerald, the bright glitter that is cast by money across the surface of the world. And, like Fitzgerald, he also shows exactly the dullness, the grey-cuffed shame of not having money's careless sense of leisured ease... What does it feel like, Markovits seems to be asking ..., if you want certain things very badly and you don't have them? To read Imposture is to feel, along with the characters, exactly what it's like."

Equally, there's a consistent undercurrent that reiterates the vampire theme: "Polidori, Byron, Pattieson, Eliza and even Markovits are all guilty of using the lifeblood of another for gain and the novel is riddled with pale skin, dark eyes, blood-flushed cheeks, shadows, dark laneways and lurking figures."

I had just two beefs:

One was the framing story of Peter Pattieson. We are given the scenario at the beginning, but then we hear no more of it, which seems a little odd. But from reading the intros to the other two books of the trilogy, it seems I just have to read on.

The other qualm was about the language. I'm not an expert, but to me, it doesn't always sound like the language of Byron's times...

But all in all, this is a complex, rewarding, and thoroughly enjoyable read.