THE WICKED LORD

BYRON - a novel by

Richard Deakin

THE WICKED LORD BYRON  a novel by Richard Deakin   (summary)

On his deathbed, the two halves of Byron’s personality – tragic doomed Romantic,  the “body” - and laughing cynical dandy,  the “Nightgowned Spririt” - separate and begin to argue about his life, viz: young man has strange and stressful upbringing, becomes rather eccentric, yet is able to touch on the spirit of the age in a piece of juvenilia (first two books of Childe Harold.)  Becomes the first modern celebrity - ludicrously famous. 

Conscious of his own strangeness - OVERCONSCIOUS of himself - he embarks on a doomed love affair with his sister.  In order to save his reputation he makes a disastrous marriage which has an opposite effect to that he intended - the scandal exiles him from his country.  Desolate, uprooted and desperately lonely after the years of fame, he contemplates death in the Alps - but returning to the world below (now Venice) he indulges in gargantuan acts of sensuality, which, as such things do, finally pall. 

Ultimately, despite himself, he falls in love - sexually, with a woman (Teresa) and, platonically, with a man (Shelley) and is able for a little while to construct his own little freethinking society around himself in Pisa (it helps that he is rich.)  With the death of Shelley comes a spiritual crisis that results in his throwing his life away on the nearest worthy cause - for this radical dandy, the nearest revolution - in Greece.   At the moment of his own death the two conflicting halves of the personality come to a final understanding, and make peace.

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THE WICKED LORD BYRON is an attempt to reconstruct, in the form of a novel, a sense of the mind and life of Byron, whose work and personality are obviously a defining moment in the evolution of modern consciousness.  It is not strictly speaking a “historical” novel, having in some respects more in common with THE MASTER AND MARGARITA or Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s fictional school of magic realism.  The novel is an attempt to investigate how the consciousness, memory, reconstructs the materials of its own past, in a constant attempt to make sense of the present.  “Why was I not made aware of this [the mortality of his illness] before now?” complained Byron, on his deathbed, as if he NEEDED more time to make sense of his life before the end.  The story grants the dying poet-hero this time, a brief respite to reflect on and reconstruct his significant past, before death and eternity fixes it forever.  If there are some slight changes made in the recollected order of events, for the most part the poet becomes aware of these changes, which are simply an attempt to make best sense of the material.  Occasionally the dying poet even objects to emendations made by his other self, who is “editing” the material!

Mostly I wanted to give a fuller sense of this richly endowed being than I have previously seen given in fiction: a brave man, a kind man, sometimes a cruel man, but most impressively a man who, because of the astonishing breadth of his point of view, could always see the funny side of our essentially tragic existence.