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Loving Mephistopheles
Miranda
Miller's fifth novel, is a literary fantasy, a
twenty-first century version of Faust. In 1923, in a West
End restaurant, Jenny, a music hall chanteuse, signs a
contract with Leo, her lover, a mysterious conjuror: she will look 25
forever in return for loving him.
To explain her failure to age, Jenny reinvents herself as her own daughter
in wartime London and as her granddaughter
in 1960s London.
Leo also has many incarnations, as an RAF pilot, a drug dealer and a
director of the Metaphysical Bank in High Street Kensington, where the
contracts of the eternally young and rich are stored.
Jenny discovers that people always take her at her face value although her
inner self changes. Leo also develops, as he slowly and painfully discovers
his humanity. Eternal life becomes even more complicated when Jenny, in her
eighties but still looking 25, gives birth to a daughter whose father may
or may not be Leo.
The
emotional trigger for this novel was my good fortune in surviving breast
cancer. The idea of writing about a woman who lived forever seemed both
defiant and entertaining. I have always been fascinated by mythology and
fantasy and wanted to find a more imaginative way of writing. Earlier
versions of this novel were turned down by almost every publisher in London.
Hilary Mantel on Loving Mephistopheles:
"It's a wonderfully generous novel, several books rolled into one,
and I would have been happy to stay with any of the strands or any of the
places she taked us to - I was particularly
struck by her recreation of Edwardian London
and of the London
of the modern homeless. it's an epic narrative
full of energy, with the wild and joyful inventiveness of an Angela Carter
story."
Kate Saunders in The Times:
A strange mixture here,
but strangely beguiling- with echoes of J K Rowling and Angela Carter, and
guest appearances by the likes of Max Beerbohm and Ezra Pound. We
begin in Edwardian London.
Jenny is a gutter-bred beauty making a living as a singer in the
music halls when she meets the love of her life, the mysterious Leo.
Through him, she sells her soul in exchange for eternal youth, and the two
proceed to blaze a trail through the history of the 20th century. Great fun
- utterly gripping if you just want the story, enormously clever if you
appreciate erudition.
Virginia Croft in The Small Press Review:
It
is a peculiar thing that no one seems to value originality anymore.
After Dan Brown's blockbuster novel, The Da Vinci
Code, leapt to the top of the
world's best seller lists it spawned a rash of imitations - The New Da
Vinci Code, Move Over Dan Brown were
amongst the claims on novels in every bookshop in every town. So it
was with extreme trepidation that I approached a novel that novelist and
critic, Hilary Mantel, describes as "An epic narrative full of energy,
with the wild and joyful inventiveness of an Angela Carter story."
Do I, I pondered, really want to read a book that is written in the style of.....? Keep that question in your
head, I shall return to it later.
Loving Mephistopheles is the story of Jenny Mankowitz, a working class unfortunate of low morals
and high expectations. In her desire to become a music hall star she
meets Leopold M Bishop, professional tutor and agent. The 14 year old
determines to seduce her teacher and thus embarks on an adventure of many
lifetimes. Leo is not the stilted, awkward gentleman he at first
appears. Captivated by the brash Jenny, he nonetheless exploits her youth
and her body. Her talents as a music
hall star are third rate, but her youthful appearance guarantees her many
gentlemen admirers, and she is soon engaged in more private performances to
boost her lover's income. At 25, Jenny, fearful that her looks will
soon fade, unwittingly enters a pact with the devilish Leo and sells her
soul in return for eternal life. The only condition? That she
will always love him.
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Leo; The Great Pantoffsky, fighter pilot, drug dealer, city banker; to
name but a few. The man is older than Methuselah. His lovers
have numbered Cleopatra, Oliver Cromwell and Sibyl -
perhaps the original of the many sibyls of ancient myth.
As a founder director of the Banca Metafisica, an ever-increasing band of immortals, Leo
is above morals and human frailties.
Like Leo, Jenny is
forced to constantly re-invent himself as the years pass. Assuming the identity of her imagined
daughter and granddaughter, she constantly swerves between loving and
loathing her Svengali. Living with him one
minute, the next escaping his clutches and living alone in Italy.
Yet it seems inevitable that they will always be together until the
unthinkable happens. Jenny becomes pregnant.
Loving Mephistopheles is Miranda Miller's fifth novel.
If one watches her interview on YouTube you see a woman in her
fifties with no nonsense bob and a feisty, intelligent outlook on
life. Miller has lived in Rome, Japan, Libya
and Saudi Arabia.
In addition to the novels she has written a collection of short stories
and a non-fiction work exploring the effect of homelessness on women.
After suffering from breast cancer and bringing up a teenage
daughter, she conceived the idea for Loving Mephistopheles. Nine years in the writing, she originally intended it to be a
trilogy. Every publisher in London
turned down the first incarnations of the novel before it was
eventually accepted by Peter Owen.
Loosely based on
Faust, Miller says she wanted to "Satirize the cult of youth" and
explore the widening gap between rich and poor. She also felt
compelled to write further about homelessness. Here we see a true
writer who uses her passions to great effect. In her YouTube
interview Miller comments that most publishers would rather publish the
memoirs of a footballer or B list celebrity. Perhaps a slight hint of bitterness? But,
of course, Miller has a point. We have become a nation of voyeurs.
Reality TV has, it seems, replaced real life. Baudrillard's
simulacra theory is becoming ever more convincing in our twenty-first
century world, to escape from reality many of us are engaging with a
representation of reality.
So if we are
yearning to escape for an hour or two, why not follow Jasper Fforde's example and get Lost in a Good Book? In the early Jenny we can almost
hear Wallace Simpson clearly annunciating "You can never be too rich
or too thin." Throw in Manhattan
socialite, Nan Kempner, for good measure
and stir in a healthy dollop of magic realism, time travel, horror, sci fi and eroticism and you
have the recipe for an outstanding work of fiction.
For this is an
outstanding work. One can see why Miller has been compared to Angela
Carter; she has the same breadth of imagination, inventiveness and
audacity. But there the comparisons should stop. Carter worked,
at her best, as a writer of short stories. One only has to look at Nights at the Circus. One could definitely draw parallels, the
story of stories within stories, but Miller manages to both captivate the
reader and draw her to new imaginings whilst all the time keeping firmly
within the bounds of the story. In Loving Mephistopheles there
is not the danger that one will be lost in a sub story only to be brought
up short and slightly dazed when it switches.
The third part of
the novel, with its seemingly extreme change of genre, jars slightly.
Yet, on reflection, it was possibly the only way Miller could have
written to retain the sense of freshness and originality. The story
drags us on, with ever increasing impetus, to inevitable disaster. I defy
anyone to predict the ending. Just
sit back and enjoy the ride.
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