A FACTORY OF CUNNING
By Philippa Stockley. Harcourt. 355 pp. $25
Even if you've never fantasized about Jane Austen in leather, you'll get a kick out of A Factory of Cunning. This deliciously wicked novel by British writer Philippa Stockley takes us back to London in the late 18th century, a dark, scurrilous time of strict public morality but ubiquitous sexual exploitation. Of course, it's difficult to fathom people so alien to us now as we deliberate how to punish Janet Jackson's errant breast while downloading pornography on a laptop at Starbucks. But Stockley is such a clever writer that somehow the relevance of her naughty historical novel peeks through.
The story comes to us as a montage of letters, notes and journal entries either written by or swirling around a woman aptly called Mrs. Fox, a French noblewoman who has left a trail of blood and broken hearts. At first we know very little about her, but by the end we know almost nothing at all. She's a fantastically slippery character, a shape-shifting madame who plays on the most unexpected juxtapositions to glide just beyond the reach of the law. Her beauty mesmerizes everyone, but she travels unnoticed by disguising herself as a scarred hag. She maintains an air of elegant propriety to engineer the most ghastly crimes. She's as ready to unman her opponents with "sudden nunnish conversation" as with a knife, and her moral dexterity is rivaled only by her sexual flexibility. One enemy, she notes dismissively, "portrayed me as the Whore of Babylon, which was an uninspired comparison."
The story opens when Mrs. Fox is dumped onto a slimy, fetid port in London after fleeing a deadly scandal. A harlot slips away with most of her luggage and money, leaving her undefended, "lingering in a place that recognises refinement as a purse tempts tragedy." Poor Mrs. Fox, exhausted, friendless and destitute, trudges into a city of "felons and sharpsters, jacks and jades." They don't stand a chance against her. "A life spent in immorality has certain compensations," she writes, "one being the recuperative genius of cactus." Equipped with only a few names recommended to her by an old friend in Holland, she takes a shabby back-alley room and begins plotting her next conquest with entrepreneurial energy. "Fortunately," she writes, "I have a disposition that revels in rational decisions and swift action." Believing that value is determined entirely by how others' perceptions are manipulated, Mrs. Fox leverages what little she possesses to build her next fortune. It takes careful planning, flawless forgery, brazen blackmail -- and a fabulous wardrobe. Stockley, who studied period costumes at the Courtauld Institute of Art in London, luxuriates in dressmaking details. The pages of this unscrupulous story are lined with lace, silk and muslin -- all of it stitched together in a fabric of shimmering deceit.
The complicated plot -- tangled further by the way it comes to us -- involves Mrs. Fox's efforts to find a suitable beau in the country and set up a lavish whorehouse in the city (with dentistry and abortions on the side). These dangerous liaisons are woven into her scheme to destroy England's most notorious aristocrat, an art collector named Earl Much, who intoxicates his nubile victims with generosity before snuffing them out. He's evil, even by Mrs. Fox's standards, but she knows how to play wealth against itself: "Those whose pockets are deep enough, finding that humanity will jump for them, soon suffer the conceit of omniscience, confusing purchase with prescience." A friend warns her that Earl Much "fears nothing; he has given his life to taking men's souls. . . . He is a libertine of the most dangerous sort. No one withstands him . . . . To meet him is a passport to Hell." She's unimpressed. "He is a factory of seduction," she admits. "But you must have no concerns for my safety. . . . You once joked that in Much I had met my match. It is the reverse: in me, he has met his."
I'm hesitant to give anything away -- or reveal that I got some of it wrong -- but the machinations that follow are devilishly fun, sometimes just downright devilish. As the noose tightens around Mrs. Fox, her sexcapade threatens to collapse in a scandal of murder and incest that eventually rises to a Gothic shriek.
We can't resist playing along with the story's presumption of widespread literacy in the 1780s and a dedication to correspondence that sometimes stretches credulity. (If someone burst into your room with terrible news while you were composing a letter, would you maintain the concentration to write, "Victorine has just run in, cap sideways, a look in her eyes that can only be described as mad -- I will continue when I have found out what trivial matter has discomposed her to this unseemly degree"?) Believability aside, the format creates a marvelous sense of immediacy: Notes cross in a panic, decoy letters throw off spies, and missives miss each other at crucial moments -- it's a veritable flurry of Georgian e-mail.
Stockley also provides a witty but frustratingly spotty glossary of 18th-century terms in the back, along with a sprinkling of wry editorial footnotes that demonstrate -- though no further evidence is necessary -- that she's entirely at home in the halls and sewers of this lush and dismal period. In her kaleidoscope of revenge and intrigue, morality is just a game played by characters of deadly determination and poisonous duplicity. As a display of linguistic gymnastics, the story is dazzling. As a study of human nature, it's a view from the bottom up, in more ways than one. •
Ron Charles is a senior editor of Book World.
