Gaveston by Stephanie Merritt

More of a damp squib than a red-hot poker

Piers Gaveston, the dashing, dangerous hero of Stephanie Merritt's debut novel, has an ignoble history. The 14th-century original was a charming Gascon commoner who seduced Edward II, was married off to a royal niece and alienated the English aristocracy with his sharp tongue and envied hold over the monarch, until he finally met with an unwholesome death by hot poker.

Gaveston's story has been often disinterred, most notably in Christopher Marlowe's play Edward II and a 1991 film by Derek Jarman, for whom the themes of ominous politicising and sexual violence seemed to have been made. The Gaveston myth has even been described as an early gay-rights campaign. But in Merritt's contemporary reworking, the story belongs to Gaby: the gulled niece of Sir Edward Hamilton Harvey, a seemingly invulnerable media baron whose one weakness leads him to manipulate her into becoming part of his sorry ménage.

The modern Gaveston is set in an "ancient university", which the bullying Edward is seeking, insidiously, to add to his empire. Gaveston's royal favour is an appointment at the new media faculty, paid for by Sir Edward (cue an earnest debate about dumbing down), and the jealous agents of his destruction are the fumblingly perfidious British press – a depiction we can only assume is informed by the author's experience as a newspaper journalist.

It is these characterisations, however, that let the novel down. This is a world in which kindly professors are "tweedy", "owlish" and can't work their answering machines; smelly students eat curry and watch TV in their pants; Scottish housekeepers say things like "Ye'll ruin your eyes, all that reading. Young lassie like you," and believe there's no problem that can't be solved by "a good solid meal and a bit less brooding".

The dialogue, too, is clumsy. A professor feted for his sense of humour is demonstrably unfunny. Characters "blink stupidly", "sniff unnecessarily" and are unable to smile unless it is "cryptic" or "one-sided". Minute descriptions of the lighting of every cigarette (there are many) become deeply tedious.

Amid this one-dimensional line-up, the more carefully nuanced Gaveston rightly stands out as the most real and unusual personality – by turns perverse, solicitous, ambitious and cruel. And in between the clunking set-pieces, some gloriously catty observations are dropped into the plot: Mervyn Bland, the TV host whose tenses "leap around all over the show like marmosets over the Cotswolds'; Jonathan Pleasant, the People's Poet who writes odes to the opening of the Metropolitan Line extension. There are faces "kippered with smoke" (no wonder, after all those cigarettes).

That Merritt is able to conjure such delightful surprises from this well-used story is one of the novel's triumphs. But her confused and contrary Gaveston fails to dominate the novel as he should. He is described in terms of Milton's Satan: "He above the rest/ In shape and gesture proudly eminent/ Stood like a tower."

Instead, he stands like a silo in an otherwise featureless landscape. These moments of attempted cleverness and literary allusion are clumsy; but Merritt's own acute observations surpass her attempts at pastiche. It is when it stops trying too hard that Gaveston finally succeeds.