‘Making Love: A Conspiracy of the Heart’

Marius Brill Doubleday £12.99

Women who snort when they laugh and men prone to getting erections in public should read this at home. After much acclaim as a scriptwriter for radio, stage and screen, Marius Brill has, in his first novel, served up a smorgasbord of romantic romp, pseudo-scholarship, urban melodrama and metafictional mystery, narrated, confusingly, by a talking book whose written subject is the invention of love. For Schopenhauer, love's just a tool of the will; for Richard Dawkins, it's a simulacrum generated by the selfish gene - but what if it's really been made by military intelligence as the opium of the people?

This is the book's subversive theory, and MI5 tried to destroy every copy. One, however, lay hidden on a library shelf until Miranda came along. Since this beautiful but bedraggled Shepherd's Bush lonely heart hates most things and most of all men, the conspiracy theory fits her outlook on life. When the modern-day Ministry of Love discovers that a copy has surfaced, it reactivates operation 'Love Nuts' and sends the 'tall, dark and handsome' Ferdinand to convince Miranda that love is real, or kill her.

If there are two ways to end a love story - either as fairy-tale or tragedy - Brill mocks them both in this wilfully light-hearted parody. Ferdinand whisks Miranda off to Venice, but after endless romping he falls genuinely in love and turns renegade. MI5 pursue them with bombs and helicopters and, while she's petrified, he's neither shaken nor stirred. As if this story wasn't confusing enough, the book falls in love with her and becomes jealous of him.

The danger with highly self-conscious prose is that cleverness can bleach away emotional colour. 'Making Love', however, contains such a subtle dappling of tints that each smitten reader will make it a ménage á quatre. Nick Seddon