H Hamilton £16.99 pp262

Set during the decline of the Austro-Hungarian empire, Dan Jacobson’s ironically entitled All for Love, his first novel for 12 years, is a fictionalised account of a royal scandal reminiscent of the tragedy at Mayerling (where the Hapsburg Prince Rudolph apparently committed suicide with his mistress). Rudolph’s widow, Stephanie, was the sister of Jacobson’s heroine, Princess Louise of Belgium. Yet although Louise’s catastrophic involvement with an upstart commoner had echoes of Mayerling, it becomes, in Jacobson’s sardonic version, more of a black comedy.

Romantic, preposterously theatrical, the story reads like something out of Franz Lehar. It begins in spring 1895, in Vienna’s Prater Gardens. From her coach, Princess Louise (the daughter of the wealthy, corrupt king of Belgium and the reluctant wife of Prince Philipp of Saxe-Coburg) exchanges looks with a young hussar subduing a stallion. He is Géza Mattachich, a second lieutenant in a regiment of uhlans, and the stepson of a backwoods Croatian count. From this moment their fates are sealed. Encouraged by her looks, he seduces her chambermaid, by whom he sends secret love letters. Pursuing Louise to the Adriatic, he successively gets into conversation and her bedroom. Back in Vienna, she appoints him chief groom and establishes him as her lover.

As the second act begins, the tempo increases. Expelled from Vienna, the lovers embark on a manic spending spree in Paris, passing bills for wines, lingerie, perfumes, porcelain, jewellery and hotel and casino debts to Louise’s outraged, hapless husband, who eventually challenges Mattachich to a duel. Although the prudent hussar spares the prince’s life, Philipp then refuses his wife’s debts. Lethally punctured, the lovers’ lifestyle deflates. They are sucked into a murky vortex of forgery, flight, begging and betrayal.

The final phase of the story is enlivened by sinister machinations and extravagant idealism. Lumbering into action against the gadfly lovers, the royal family deploys legal and medical resources to have him clapped in prison and her in an asylum. But help is at hand in the form of a charwoman, Maria Stöger, who, obsessed with Mattachich, wangles a job in the prison canteen, has his baby, supports his appeals, and eventually assists him in a kidnapping.

Certain features of this operatic saga — glamorous, flaky, estranged princess, based in Paris with foreign lover — seem unmistakably modern. It is, however, broadly historical, as is evidenced by frequent footnotes in which Jacobson refers to memoirs and other documents. This battery of reference could seem distracting — a postmodernist flourish designed to emphasise the relativity of narrative. Yet it also serves to highlight the prevalence of cover-ups. As their memoirs confirm, the lovers construct romanticised versions of themselves. Equally concerned with appearances, the Hapsburgs are obsessed with suppressing scandal (just as Louise’s father conceals atrocities in the Congo). Even humble Maria has compiled a myth (from newspaper cuttings) about Mattachich’s martyrdom. Centring on an act of forgery, the whole tale is concerned with falsehood.

In its fascination with the contrast between sumptuous surface and squalid depths, All for Love resembles Edwardian fiction. Like novels by Henry James or Edith Wharton, it evokes a world in which propriety and principle conceal what is predatory, greedy and corrupt. Like Ford Madox Ford’s The Good Soldier, it stresses both the pathos and farce of self-deception. But what makes it most gripping is its prose — sparkling, satirical, pungently suggestive: King Leopold with “his great beard hanging down from his chin like a feedbag on a horse”; the couch on which Mattachich seduces the chambermaid, with its “cruelly curved legs, like a bandy dwarf’s”. Thoroughly researched and vividly imagined, Jacobson’s drama of transgression and repression is a compulsive page-turner.

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