Output details

Childish Loves

The conclusion of Markovits's trilogy draws on both Playing Days and the previous Byron novels. The story is split between a contemporary narrator, who shares Markovits’s name and is also the author of Playing Days, and a series of historical sections and split narratives – which imagine three different versions of Byron’s lost memoirs, told at different periods of his life. Both narrative strands pretend to be a kind of memoir, told either from Byron’s or Markovits’s point of view. The novel borrows from the genre of detective fiction, in which the overlaps between stories suggest clues to the solution of a kind of crime. But over the course of the novel, the question of truth-in-fiction turns out to be less important than another, related question – in what way do we learn from fiction? The attempt to answer this ties together not just the split strands of Childish Loves but the trilogy as a whole.