Imposture (Byron Trilogy) [Paperback]

Imposture is the first in the Byron trilogy and concerns Dr Polidori, the author of The Vampyre. Dr Polidori was a young man when he accompanied Byron on a trip to Europe, where Byron was escaping a bad divorce and scandal involving his sister. He was there, during the famous storm, when Mary Shelley wrote Frankenstein after a writing competition was proposed. Polidori, whose own writing attempts had been scorned by both Byron and Shelley, wrote The Vampyre. The story has caused a sensation in London, mostly because the publisher has allowed several hints to suggest it was actually written by Byron himself. Dr Polidori goes to inform the publisher he is, in fact, the author and meets Eliza, a dependent and lonely girl without prospects or great beauty, overshadowed by her married sister. Some years before she stood outside Byron's house, the night before he left the country, and saw Polidori at the window. She thought he was Byron and, when Polidori realises this, he is somehow unwilling to put her right. From this beginning, the story unravels.

Polidori has been totally overshadowed by his short association with the poet and feels his life has been defined by the period he spent with him. The deception was not planned - either of his work being printed as Byron's, or as Eliza recognising him as such. However, Polidori seems unable to emerge from Byron's shadow as the deception continues and he looks back on what happened. The story also considers Eliza and her dreams and wish fulfillment. Even though it seems impossible that she could meet Byron himself and that what is happening occurs, she is desperate to believe it. Polidori has been touched by greatness that is not his own - would The Vampyre have merit if he had been able to publish under his own name? Would Eliza have been interested in him if she had known he was Byron's doctor (and not a very successful one), rather than the poet himself? This is a fairly short book, but the prose is exquisite and there is a great sense of time and place. The dialogue and the description, make the book almost poetical, and it is one to sink into and enjoy. Anyone with an interest in the Romantics will enjoy this short, but satisfying read and will wish to read the next in the trilogy. I am just off to download it now!

A chance meeting and sly, covetous glance begins this seductive period piece that centers around the riddle of mistaken identify and in the process brings the cause celebre of 19th century London to life. John Polidori, the Italian English physician and writer is thrust into a chance enounter with the idealistic and fanciful Eliza Esmond when they meet one morning on the rainy doorsteps of Lord Byron's publisher Henry Colburn.

Eliza automatically assumes that the handsome John is in fact the celebrated poet and author of The Vampyre, the first vampire story to be published in English. Eliza, however, doesn't quite figure that Polidori, has in fact, written the work himself, when three years earlier, he had entered Lord Byron's service as his personal physician and had accompanied Byron on a trip through Europe where they stayed at the Villa Diodati, a house Byron rented by Lake Geneva.

It is here, undertaking the chance to further his ambitions that Polidori had met with Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin and her fiancie Percy Bysshe Shelley, and also Mary's stepsister, Claire Clairmont, and where the famous novel Frankenstein was born. Well aware of Byon's promiscuous reputation and also his infamous associations, particulary with the Shelley's, Eliza automatically falls under Polidori/Byron's spell, totally enamored and also quite flattered by the possibly that she has at last reconnected with the striking poet.

Unfortunately Polidori is not the sort of man to accept his failings and "apt to stick when nothing good could come of sticking," he decides to go along with the pretense, the girl's ridiculous attentions somehow heartening him and her silly delusions proving to be something that he could quite easily perpetuate. Certainly this imposture could work because in the past people have commented that Byron and Polidori are like a youthful mirror" and are much alike. On more than one occasion they had been mistaken for each other.

As this hero and heroine are fuelled by their propensity towards artifice and the urge to indulge their impulsive natures, neither prepared to face the truth, the author interlaces his story with Polidori's past as he sinks into the reveries of his travels with Byron. It is here that the kernal of his story began: the first taste of woman's flesh, the night that he spent in Dover with the poet on the eve of their setting forth for France, and also Byron's old friend Hobhouse who openly resented having to chaperone this young and ambitious doctor.

Of course, Byron and Polidori do eventually go their separate ways, but not before the physician has engendered a type of sympathy for Byron with regard to the amusement at "playing the part." But Polidoro also learns that everyone needs a pose and a posture to get what one wants, which is why it becomes so easy for him to pass his work off as someone else's and also to lie to the poor, willing Eliza about his identity.

Polidori, however doesn't count on the tender feelings that indulging in this kind of charade can evoke. Although he becomes intent on seducing Eliza, an innocent girl whose only sin is her sensibility, Polidori is constantly wracked by his impulsive nature - there's nothing in his life that cannot be wagered and bet upon - and for him, even as he spends his evenings gambling his fortune away, his imposture, that of countenancing Eliza's silly misapprehensions, allows him to find relief even for a moment from the squalor of his life.

Meanwhile, the poor Eliza never senses trouble, at least until it is too late. Her older sister Beatrice warns her by whispering furtive hints into her ear and Beatrice knows that it's just like Eliza to fall for a hopeless impostor by the way she wastes herself on books. Surely she cannot realistically imagine that one day Lord Byron himself would actually come to woo her. Still, Eliza refuses to listen, her youthful imagination belying a sense of self-importance and arrogence. In the end, her confidence that she can one day actually persuade Byon to love her triumphs all of her powers of reason.

In truly elegant prose and containing some of the most kaleidoscopic imagery of Victorian England, Imposture comes across as almost reminiscent of the nineteenth century courtship novel. Benjamin Markovits eventually coalesces Polidori's own spiritual and financial struggles with that of Eliza's growth and maturity as a woman in a society where the urge for desire has its own sensual rewards and where the price of fakery and deceit seems to be boundless.

Thrown into a maelstrom of unrestrained deceitfulness from which it seems almost impossible to escape, the poor Eliza must endure the ultimate imposture and the most crucial misapprehension of character yet before she can move on with her life and free herself from the structures of Polidori's attentions.

In the end, both of these flawed protagonists are blindsided by the delusions of romance and confounded by a predicament they just cannot control: Polidori continues to be consumed with his enigmatic sexuality and perhaps even by his furtive attraction to Bryon, and Eliza, the wild child, although playing at being grown, becomes dangerously close to sacrificing her most precious commodity: her innocence. Mike Leonard May 2008

Dr Polidori, a physician with what amounts to an almost supernatural gift when it comes to unintentionally killing his patients, finds himself unable to emerge from Lord Byron's shadow when the poet dispenses with his services. Even worse for his future sanity Polidori and Byron bear more than a passing resemblence to each other (one of the reasons Byron engages the doctor in the first place is so that, in glancing at the doctor, he can see himself "reflected in a youthful mirror"). Women, believing Polidori to be Byron, throw themselves at his feet, only to pick themselves up again all too quickly when they realise their mistake. Sensing his own personality and abilities pale into insignificance when set beside Byron's immense charisma and charm Polidori begins to slide into despair. When a charming, innocent girl called Eliza mistakes him for the poet he is faced with a choice - play up to the girl's error and milk the situation for all it is worth or tell her the truth and risk losing her for ever.

Benjamin Markovits' novel is written in a pastiche of the times in which it is set, making the prose heavy with description and highly mannered in its presentation. Initially I did find it a little heavy going but Polidori, with his sense of failure and rather bitter despair, actually makes for a curiously engaging narrator: we continually hope for the best for him, while simultaneously expecting the worst. Eliza, meanwhile, is sweet and fascinating without ever being overly sugary. In the midst of the tale of deception, mistaken identity and lost opportunities is a perceptive meditation on the nature of fame, sexual-magnetism and success.

The novel is only two hundred pages in length, and the prose is rather heavy (although some of the descriptions are breathtakingly beautiful), but all the same reading it is a rather intense experience. This is how the unlucky in life view their more successful counterparts. If you have ever seen the girl of your dreams being chatted-up by an impossibly smooth, successful and good-looking rival you'll know exactly how Polidori feels. If you were offered the chance to swap places, and be the good-looking rival yourself, wouldn't you be tempted, even though you knew it was wrong?

Imposture, with its curiously likeable, shabby central character and its charming vulnerable heroine, is a cautionary tale for us all on the nature of fame, power and success. Read it, and be careful what you wish for.