A Quiet Adjustment, by Benjamin Markovits

Dangerous liaison: The Byron trilogy continues with a terrifying portrait of the poet’s capacity for psychological cruelty

With Imposture, the first novel in his Byron trilogy, Markovits gave us a glimpse of his anti-hero through the eyes of his physician, John Polidori, who briefly impersonates him. Byron’s fame secured bestseller status for Polidori’s novella The Vampyre, supposed to have been written by Byron himself. Markovits prefaced his tale with an account of his meeting, as a young teacher, with an older professor, one Peter Pattieson. This was a persona too – the professor, who, Markovits declared, had actually written Imposture, had taken his name from one of Walter Scott’s Waverley novels. In The Bride of Lammermoor, that very same Peter Pattieson repeated the words of an artist friend on the cheapness of fame.

Where Imposture kept Byron at a distance, largely viewing him in his public guise as notorious poet, A Quiet Adjustment brings us up close, right inside his marriage to Annabella Milbanke. Great fame allows strangers all sorts of conjectures about the personal; now we see the essence of Caroline Lamb’s immortal judgement on Byron as “mad, bad and dangerous to know”. Where will Markovits’s final novel in the trilogy take him? Into Byron’s head to show how fame corrodes from the inside?

On the evidence of the first two novels, Markovits would manage such a task with ease. A Quiet Adjustmentis told from Annabella’s point of view: from her first glimpse of Byron, dancing, fatefully enough, with his halfsister Augusta, through his courtship of her, which she rightly suspects has been manufactured by Caroline Lamb and her own aunt, and their eventual marriage. Annabella, a clever, wealthy, sheltered young girl, initially refuses Byron, but he presses his case, and eventually she succumbs. Too late, however, to save her husband from his demons.

From the wedding day on, Annabella knows that something has gone wrong, and Byron repeatedly blames his inner torments on her delay in marrying him. Annabella takes a long time to work out what those of us familiar with Byron’s life story already know: that Byron is sexually involved with Augusta. Markovits charts the growing suspicion, desperation and final disillusionment of Annabella with remarkable compassion and insight, the delicacy of his writing perfectly matching the delicacy of certain key scenes, where Byron’s attempts to corrupt and destroy his wife convey a sense of her fear for her own soul.

This is a truly remarkable novel. Taking its time from the beginning, it gently hooks us into Annabella’s world, a complex, contradictory one of personal insecurities and moral absolutes, to show, ultimately, what an abusive relationship looks like. We may see Markovits’s Byron break down in tears; we may hear him futilely smashing bottles against the ceiling just after Annabella gives birth; but he is as insidious as Dickens’s Uriah Heep, as deadly as Polidori’s vampyre. What Markovits has achieved here is much more than a continuation of some literary game; it is a startling, psychologically terrifying portrait of an individual with the capacity to destroy lives. How he surpasses this will be interesting to see.

A Quiet Adjustment, By Benjamin Markovits, Faber £10.99