Botox and “vampire facials” might be at the vanguard of the modern beauty industry, but they are nothing new: the 17th-century proto-celebrity Venetia Stanley, horrified by her thickening looks, drank viper wine, a pungent anti-ageing concoction of snake blood, horse urine and the all-important opium. Reimagining Venetia’s world in the months before her mysterious death in 1633, Hermione Eyre’s debut novel reads like one of her subject’s intoxicated dreams. Plump with bizarre images (a captive monkey, a royal masque, a plate of rat meat) and sensual detail (such as, the ritual of a biannual bath), it luxuriates in obsolete Stuart vocabulary and tunes in and out of different voices. Yet Viper Wine wants to be more than an impressively realised, cleverly resonant historical novel: while Venetia yearns to halt time’s destructive march, her husband Sir Kenelm Digby – explorer, alchemist and gunpowder plotter’s son – receives messages and visitations from the future, quoting Monty Python and David Bowie. Viper Wine’s natural beauty doesn’t really need puffing out with these injections of postmodern dermal filler: Eyre’s writing about artifice, desire and life’s inherent treachery is already alluring enough.
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