The Virtues of Scandal: A Novel of Lord Byron
This retelling of the last decade in the life of George Gordon, Lord Byron, opens at the battle of Missolonghi in 1824, to the sound of ‘the pulpy thud of pikes on flesh.’ Abramson gives Byron a rather more heroic death than the combination of sepsis and bloodletting that actually carried him off, probably granting the poet the end he would have preferred.
There are three strands to the novel: Byron in London at the time of the publication of Don Juan, provoking a petulant and envious Robert Southey and exasperating his publisher; Byron on the run from murderous janissaries in Greece, along with the long-suffering John Cam Hobhouse and Dr. Polidori; and the adventures of the youthful Don Juan between shipwreck, the Sultan’s harem in Constantinople, and the court of the Tsar.
Aside from occasional grammatical infelicities such as ‘the Tsar of all the Russia’s’ and the geographically confused reference to a villa in Ravenna ‘on the Grand Canal between the Piazza San Marco and the Rialto Bridge,’ Abramson’s prose is confident and engaging, particularly where he describes a bravura bouts-rimés competition between Byron and Southey, with Wordsworth and a brittle Lady Caroline Lamb looking on. His attention to detail impresses, as in the pink Himalayan salt of the harem, or the vinegar with which Byron dilutes his ink. His greatest gift is for dialogue, particularly in the mouth of a vengeful but gradually disintegrating Lord Castlereagh and in Byron’s invented address to the House of Lords.
Where Abramson has departed from historical fact in favor of dramatic impact is detailed in his closing notes; paradoxically, he can do this successfully because he really knows his material.
