Marius Brill: Making Love - A Conspiracy of the Heart

Reviewed by STEPHANIE JOHNSON

This is Marius Brill's first novel and is, quite possibly, a work that approaches genius. If the esoteric author bio is to be believed, Brill has had previous incarnations as a journalist, a doorman and a playwright. Whatever, he has the true gift of the story-teller and a recognisably very British sense of humour.

The narrator of the novel is itself a book, a cognisant volume that falls in love with the young woman who steals it from the library shelves. Brill employs the e.e. cummings technique of using a lower-case I and allows the book, A Conspiracy of the Heart, an omniscient view of his character's hearts and minds. So far, so risky, the reader thinks, and wonders if Brill will be able to pull it off.

Heroine Miranda works in a department store, demonstrating the absorbent powers of sanitary towels with the aid of a jug of blue water. She lives in a dreary Shepherds Bush bed-sit with a bloodthirsty gerbil called Caliban, and leads a solitary and desperate life, her only lover a compulsive bum-scratcher with the moniker of Barry Shitty-Digit, her only friend a man-eating nymphomaniac called Mercy.

The plot, and there is plenty of it, spins from the fact that Miranda's stolen copy of A Conspiracy of the Heart is the last one existent, all others having been banned and burned. Deeply subversive, this book argues that romantic love is a con, even a perversion, a cultural persuasion that fills the gap left after the demise of religious love, an opiate for the masses invented some time after the 12th century.

Why should we crave, asks Paul Pennyfeather, its supposed author, an emotion that leaves us sleepless, without appetite, and destined for disappointment? He quotes Borges, "To fall in love is to create a religion which has a fallible God". He also quotes American psychologist Dorothy Tennov's 1970s coined term of limerence for the involuntarily obsessional experience of being in love.

The pages of this fictional work of nonfiction are woven into the adventures of Miranda, her encounters with the Secret Service (who wish to retrieve the book), and her love affair with a handsome spy.

Perhaps despite itself, Making Love is, in fact, a love story. Mostly, though, it is a piece of comic brilliance, frequently faecal, sometimes reminiscent of glee clubs, often politically incorrect, verging on misogynist, and undiscriminating in its target.

Even Aussie-themed pubs come in for a fair ribbing - however many Aussie pubs open, spookily there are always enough Australians to fill them. Further on, Miranda muses briefly about Australian culture. Then she thought that there probably wasn't any.

Doubleday, $26.95

* Stephanie Johnson is the author of The Shag Incident, winner of last year's Deutz Medal for fiction.