A FACTORY OF CUNNING
By Philippa Stockley
Little, Brown, £14.99; 384pp
ISBN 0 316 72928 0
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This postmodern foray into historical fiction spins a fantastical tale of glittering villains stalking the demi-monde of 18th-century London. But the real, dazzling star of Philippa Stockley’s book is her language, hectically whipped up as lace frills on a fop’s wristband, her tartly elegant narrative twisting as voluptuously as the diamonds on a courtesan’s neck.

This author delights in both the materiality and the artifice of words, their capacity to name, charm, tease and mystify, and also in her own power to string the reader along, offering a series of enticing linguistic surfaces masking horrors underneath. Just as perfume on a handkerchief can disguise the stink of illness, so politeness can hide contempt and venality, so courtesy can perform a brief flourishing prelude to rape and incest.

London, in this version, comprises a haven for hypocrites, con-merchants and shape-shifters of all sorts. The main story-spinner is one Mrs Fox, a beautiful, mysterious refugee from Holland, who, we soon suspect, is escaping the fallout from her misdeeds in pre-Revolutionary Paris. Once we realise we are launched into a sequel of Les Liaisons Dangereuses, we settle back to relish Mrs Fox’s battle of wits with the devilish aristocrat she must fight to the death. Ninon de l ’Enclos meets Georgette Heyer and the Marquis de Sade, with energising results. The swashbuckling repartee gradually reveals fascinating Mrs Fox as a feminine monster, cynical, cruel and ruthless, quite prepared to corrupt any ripe young maiden she meets if this will serve her deadly aims. She is a fencer, an archer who shoots arrow-sentences compact with aggression.

Her neat turn of phrase, detailing luxurious costumes and house interiors, reveals her greed and lust for money. Her wit displays her contempt for other females: “Since when were intelligent women surprised from their garments? There is no female on earth who will not put off her panniers for a sum. But woe betide the man who tries to wrench them away! Then will lace rise up like steel cordons, and thistledown threads cut like knives.”

The story coils from Mrs Fox’s cheap lodgings in Spitalfields to richer houses, some of ill-repute, in the West End, to an estate in Suffolk, and, finally, to a cellar in which terrible crimes are committed and terrible secrets revealed. The whirligig plot, sparkling with coincidences and breathless revelations, nodding to late Shakespearean comedy as well as to French melodrama and farce, is so complex that one just has to lie back and enjoy it.

The novel is marred by occasional hanging clauses, by modern grammatical errors such as “I was stood” and “bored of” and by modern anachronisms such as “novitiate” for “novice”. One of Mrs Fox’s letters turns into a journal entry with no explanation. The footnotes, though given a plausible origin right at the end, serve to shove the plot along, and so obtrude. Mrs Fox so captivated me that I wanted her prose pastiche to be as perfect as her unripped bodice.

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