Byron in Love: A Short Daring Life by Edna O’Brien

(Norton, 228 pages, $24.95)

Charisma is hard to explain, says Edna O’Brien. George Gordon, who would become the “world’s first celebrity,” was born with a clubfoot in a modest London flat. The boy never knew his father, known as “Mad Jack,” nor the grand uncle who bequeathed him both the title Lord Byron and a crumbling Gothic manse. At 10, the young poet-to-be prowled the halls of his estate carrying two pistols and firing them as he pleased. At 17, when he enrolled at Cambridge, he attracted an immediate following. Flamboyant and reckless, he threw himself into affairs with both men and women, starting with a 15-year-old choirboy. A pregnant half-sister was among the long line of wreckage that followed, right up until Byron’s death at 36. Said one dear friend: He was “the most extraordinary and terrifying person” she had ever met.

That last remark has inspired Irish novelist O’Brien to offer her own take on the legendary Romantic poet, and we can be glad it did, said Tim Rutten in the Los Angeles Times. O’Brien approaches Byron “not as a subject, as a scholar would,” but as a character fit for a novel. She writes with a “certain impetuous and passionate intensity” that suits her story beautifully. “This is a book not only for those who value perceptive, independent intelligence but also for those who value lovely writing for its own sake.” And it doesn’t hurt that the whole sordid tale is told with admirable concision.

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O’Brien doesn’t get all her facts right, said Frances Wilson in the London Sunday Times. She seems too infatuated with “mad, bad, dangerous” Byron to notice that fame came his way at 24, not 19. The narrative poem that did the trick, Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, appears today to have been one of his most “formulaic and unoriginal” efforts. Byron’s poetry, in fact, is largely missing from O’Brien’s spirited account, said Ellen Akins in the Minneapolis Star Tribune. One price of brevity is that O’Brien tells Byron’s story almost “from afar,” breezing past the art and rendering his perfidy in an “amused, enchanted” voice. Then again, it’s O’Brien’s obvious affection for Byron that allows us to glimpse—“perhaps”—the poet’s particular charisma.