From Publishing News February 2003

Whatever Love Means

 

•  Marius Brill's novel offers a few suggestions, as Ralph Baxter hears

What is love? From Plato to Prince Charles, many a soul has pondered its meaning, many a word has been written in its name - and a whole cartoon industry has been created on that very theme. Marius Brill is the latest to consid­er the eternal question in his debut novel. Or should that be novels? Making Love is three books for the price of one, and one of them is effectively the world's first audio book in print. Clearly, this is going to take some explaining...

The bulk of the tale is an "anti-­romantic love story" meets spy caper, and it takes us from Shepherd's Bush Library to naval warfare in Serbia, via the water­ways of Venice. The source of this excitement is a book, Making Love, a treatise on the manipulation of ideas about love throughout history. Deemed subversive by the security services, the last surviv­ing copy is discovered in the hands of Miranda, who sells sanitary towels, and the quest to retrieve it begins.

In between the fantastical story are extracts from the book while, just to complicate matters further, the book itself has a voice - a needy character who falls in love with its new owner.

Admirably ambitious but free of pretension, Brill balances high seriousness with high silliness and with fewer wobbles than you'd expect. "There's romance in the story but it's really about how love is not to do with romance," he says. "It's trying to make an argument to say we can construct our relationships in life without many of our existing ideas about love." These ideas, as described in the "book within a book", head for similar territory to Alain de Botton and use examples from Greek classics, poetry, society, pol­itics and popular culture to make the points. Not exactly the same, though. The range is such that we go from Plato's Symposium to Pennyfeather's Knob Test in the space of one page. Pennyfeather's Knob Test is an invention of the "author" which sets out to prove that early love poetry is the poetry of lust by substituting the worth "love" for "knob". Can't imagine' Alain trying out that one. "I'd be foolish not to recognise that these thoughts may come out of a cynical place but it's not an act of cynicism," Brill stresses. "I'm not anti-love. But there are lots of ideas about love through the ages, some of which you can call propaganda."

The book is hardly five-hundred pages of metaphysical argument. "Without story and narrative you're fighting a losing battle. Get the ideas across without making it sound like you're teaching - that's very important to me," Brill says and, sure enough, the book contains plenty of espionage-inspired frolics, absurdities and explosions, but think Casino Royale rather than le Carré...

 

 And what of Brill's second novel? "It's more about the mind, less about the heart." And probably less about love, whatever that means...

Making Love is published on 1 May by Doubleday, price £12.99 hardback.