Shadowplay by Joseph O’Connor review – campy fun

After The Thrill of It All, a faux-rockumentary tale about the life and loves of a 1980s band, Joseph O’Connor’s new novel returns to the territory of 2010’s Ghost Light, based on an affair between dramatist JM Synge and a younger actress at the Dublin theatre where he worked.

Retelling the life of Bram Stoker, Shadowplay makes fiction out of a longstanding critical interpretation of Stoker’s 1897 novel Dracula, often read as a vessel for the mixed-up emotions spilling over from his day job as manager of a London theatre. The story starts when Stoker, a court clerk moonlighting as a drama critic in 1870s Dublin, gets catapulted into the world he writes about when he’s hired by actor Henry Irving, flattered by Stoker’s review of his Hamlet while touring Ireland.

Endlessly tiptoeing around his employer’s ego while soothing his propensity for stage fright proves more demanding than Stoker expects, coming between him and his young family as well as his literary ambitions. After Irving signs the megastar actress Ellen Terry, the novel turns into a hushed-up love triangle in which the trio’s volatile feelings for one another – all of them married – boil over when Stoker walks in on Irving and Terry in flagrante post-show.

The narrative conceit that the text of Shadowplay is an unpublished roman à clef, given by Stoker to Terry years after the events it describes, is a spark for the action, not an ingredient, despite regular interruptions (“at this point in the manuscript a 97-word paragraph appears in a code that has proven impossible to decipher”). Generally the story unfolds as a lushly enjoyable pastiche of fin-de-siècle prose, in which Victorian euphemism is an authenticating stamp that doubles as a source of humour. Amid a first-night calamity, Stoker “utter[s] many obscene words, in truth the same fricative monosyllable over and over”; a drinker isn’t “drunk” but “somewhat in the grip of German viniculture”.

But contemporary morality also contributes pathos: Stoker has anxiety dreams about same-sex desire and writes to Walt Whitman about problems in his marriage, the causes of which “one would shy from committing to paper” amid the 1895 prosecution of Oscar Wilde, an acquaintance of Stoker’s.

Appropriately, Shadowplay doesn’t stick entirely to realism, with gothic interludes featuring a murdered maidservant watching on as Stoker taps out Dracula in after-hours writing sessions. True, there’s also plenty of humdrum exposition (“Where precisely are we booked and confirmed for the summer?” Irving asks. “I have told you already,” says Stoker. “Tell me again,” Irving replies). But it’s a virtue of the novel’s set-up that this mostly feels like campy fun, and it’s testament to the novel’s levity that the central idea of Stoker turning Irving into a vampiric aristocrat comes to stand not only for the author’s private working out of his own hidden desires but also as a kind of perverse and ultimately loving revenge on a difficult boss.

• Shadowplay by Joseph O’Connor is published by Harvill Secker (£14.99). To order a copy go to guardianbookshop.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £15, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99