Making Love - A Conspiracy of the Heart

"Making Love - A conspiracy of the Heart" is a comic novel by Marius Brill first published in 2003 by Doubleday in the UK. The book's premise is something of a first in post-modern literature and since publication has gained a growing cult status in Europe. It is the subject of an apparent reference (to 'the books being alive') in the Doctor Who episode Silence in the Library in 2008. The book will be the among the topics for discussion at a session on comedy writing featuring Brill at the 2008 Henley Literary Festival on 20 September (http://www.henleyliteraryfestival.co.uk/programme2.html).

The premise is simple: the book's narrator is the very book that the reader is holding. The book claims to be sentient, aware of the reader's emotions and excited to be having a "textual" relationship with you, the reader, its new lover. However Brill complicates things when it becomes clear that you are not the book's first reader/lover and it feels it has a cathartic obligation, now entering this new relationship, to tell you - its new reader/lover - about its past and its first reader/lover: a girl who had discovered it in a library.

In telling its own history, the book is evidently becoming a new text from the original state it was in. Brill solves this paradox by interspersing the book's more recent "life" with all the pages of the original slim volume it was, before reading/love changed it.

Brill has effectively written two very funny books in one. The old book turns out to be a well researched historical conspiracy theory positing love as a construct. It questions whether love, as we imagine it, exists at all. It then suggests that there are others who would gain from encouraging the masses to concentrate on courtship rather than power or politics or injustice. As one character puts it, "Keep them so busy trying to f*** each other, they've got no time to f*** the state." This is the erections before insurections theory of history. This original book, apparently writing by a Paul Pennyfeather (a character borrowed from Evelyn Waugh's first novel "Decline and Fall") traces the history of western love from Roman poetry through medieval courtly love to modern advertising always noting how and why it has favoured the status quo of the ruling powers and how they may have influenced things.

With its combination of conspiracy theory and the credibility of its thorough historical research, the text for the "inner" book has become a popular etext download in itself without the enveloping story around it.

The majority of the book, however, is the cathartic tale of the book's first relationship. Its theory was so explosive all other copies had been destroyed by MI5, and the writer, before he was "disappeared", hid this last extant copy in a local library. So it is there that the uber-story, the tale around the book, begins. It is the often hysterical story of a love-lorn Bridget Jonesy type called Miranda who, having started reading the book, suddenly finds herself romanced by a tall, dark and - unbeknownst to her - deadly spy, intent on disabusing her of the book's notions, either by proving love is real and breaking her heart or, if that fails, breaking her neck.