The story of a murder is told backwards, in fragments, and in two Acts. The division into two dramatic Acts is a tease hinting at the essential artificiality of the drama to come.

Act 1 is a dialogue, set out like a playscript. It opens with Baron la Chafoi, survivor of the French revolutionary terror, imprisoned in an unknown place, charged with a murder he does not recall during an orgy he slept through, surrounded by people who will not acknowledge his name and who speak in an unfamiliar language. His only companion in his pitch dark cell is a Voice. Convinced that the Voice is the spirit of his hero, the Marquis de Sade, the Baron appeals to him to help him find out the identity of the murder victim, so that he can prepare a defence. He peppers his appeal with a mishmash of de Sadian wisdom about instincts (‘which tell the truth that hypocrites don’t want to hear’) and coy confession that he isn’t a very good libertine because he loves. His defence lies mainly in blaming everyone else who attended the orgy, by attributing to them implausibly complicated motives which make him the centre of the tale and everyone’s attention.

At heart, the Baron is an egotist supreme. Even the young girl, the presumed murder victim, is complicit in her own fate; with hindsight, he sees the desire for revenge (against someone else) in her eyes when she first came to him. All the participants in that orgy, in fact, are, to the Baron, no more than plot devices designed to affirm his own self importance; as in the works of the real de Sade, the complicated plots he attributes to them are there to add juice to overheated, sterile, and obsessive sexual fantasies. In the end, the Baron, libertine and sadist, presents himself as a helpless victim in the plots of manipulative women.

The Voice is a wonderful creation – by turns mystified, wry, jocular and deliciously ironic when confronted with the Baron’s denials of guilt and increasingly ludicrous exculpatory versions of what happened on the night of the orgy . ‘People see that they want to see’ he warns the Baron. ‘When people interpret, they lose themselves.’

The Baron certainly loses himself. After all his invention, the young girl turns out not to be the murder victim at all. In fact, she is a figment of his imagination, or rather de Sade’s imagination, as the whole sorry tale was based on one of his stories. Our Baron cannot even be original in his depravity.

Act 2 is narrated by an asylum attendant who explains the true story of the Baron, who is not an eighteenth century aristocrat (but you’ll have guessed that by this point – Carhalvo scattered clues with a liberal hand in Act 1) but a 21st century lawyer suspected of the murder of his wife if he is sane, or a victim of his own sick fantasies if he is insane.

‘Fear of de Sade’ is a game invented by the lawyer husband and his accountant wife, or so he claims. The game involves playing horrific practical jokes on one another – eg, a car accident, a near drowning. (It is notable that the wife is the victim of the dangerous tricks). Whoever first hesitates to raise the stakes in the game loses.

In this version of events, the lawyer is a master embezzler who takes the de Sade game to its inevitable end and has his wife murdered by two hit men. She signs her own death warrant when she says something which could be interpreted as showing knowledge of a huge conspiracy to topple the French financial system. But the reader has been well warned by the Voice not to accept any interpretation of events, and this version of events bears striking similarities to the Baron’s mindset. He murders and yet is simultaneously the victim of a manipulative woman. She lets herself be killed out of spite against him, to win the game. She ‘planned everything before she died.’ He is ‘the greatest victim of her death.’ It is difficult to keep patience with our lawyer sometimes.

But a remarkable thing happens in this half of the book. Carvalho allows a glimpse of blue sky to be seen through the feverish self-pity and foetid imaginings of the lawyer. Unlike the characters in Act 1, this woman has a past and a personality, and although the lawyer attempts to suppress these through his insistence on defining her every thought and every action in relation to himself and his morbid imaginings, somehow Carvalho shows her to us. The scene where the wife is being driven to her death is one of the most powerful scenes I have read in some time. Her tragic past is revealed, her despair at being trapped with this man, the ‘self-mutilation’ that is marriage for love ‘or some other lie’, a life ‘where everything dies except horror.’

Through this scene, the entire book is turned on its head. A different story from the lawyer/Baron’s grandiose imaginings emerges. He is a man bitter at her childlessness ‘her first trick on him’, a man who abuses her and mistrusts her. His paranoia and self-importance lead him to imagine the wild tale of the financial conspiracy which he gives as the reason for her death; it is even possible the game of de Sade is an invention to justify his behaviour. Whatever the truth is, the reader can only watch in horror her journey to death, and his contorted self-justifications.

The postscript to the book, an apparent defence of de Sade’s scribblings, is Carvalho’s last laugh on those who would make a philosophy out of sadism and its boring repetitive viciousness, who would dehumanise the victims and render them no more than puppets to be animated for someone else’s gratification. Carvalho’s wit (and he is gloriously witty, always laughing up his sleeve) reveals the tedious sterility of this type of obsession. The novel takes a swipe at postmodernist ideas of morality (subjective, relative and fond of instincts over convention, the last defence of the madman); it is also a metaphor for the dead hand of literary tradition: the lawyer mimics a French aristocrat who mimicked de Sade right down to the last aphrodisiac pastille – even his fantasies are third hand, his philosophy based on a false premise dreamed by a madman.

That’s what I see in it anyway. But the Voice does warn against interpretation. ‘People will see what they want to see – or what they can,’ he says. Readers might be as well to interpret it for themselves – it’s a hugely enjoyable exercise.

Marion Arnott lives in Paisley, Scotland. She was winner of the Phillip Good Memorial Prize For Women's Fiction 1998, CWA Short Dagger 2001 and shortlisted for CWA Short Dagger 2002. Work has appeared in Scottish Child, West Coast, Solander Magazine, Peninsula , QWF, Hayakawa Mystery Magazine (Japan), Books Ireland, Northwords, Chapman, Crimewave, and Datlow and Winding's Year's Best Fantasy and Horror volume 15. Her short story collection 'Sleepwalkers,' was published in August, 2003 by Elastic Press. To visit Marion's Showcase on this website, click here

© 2004 Laura Hird All rights reserved.