Fiction:It was 1816, the year without a summer. Mount Tambora in Indonesia had erupted with devastating consequences the previous year and the explosion was heard 2,000 kilometres away.
An unusually bad spring and summer followed, especially for the Northern hemisphere, with crop failures, famine, food riots, frost in August, red snow and strange atmospheric effects that deeply affected the painter JMW Turner, for one.
In all of this Lord Byron and his ménage; his physician John Polidori, the Shelleys, Mary and Percy, and Byron's lover Clair Clairmont - who also happened to be the half sister of Mary Shelley, and probably also her husband's lover - found themselves at a loose end in a villa on the shores of Lake Leman in the endless rain, and naturally turned their thoughts to stories of a ghoulish nature. The result: Mary Shelley's Frankenstein and The Vampyre, both of which would go on to have a surprising longevity and influence on popular culture.
The Vampyre had a strange birth. The idea seems to have originated in a fragment of a novel by Byron and been completed by Polidori. It was published in London without either man's permission and, for commercial reasons, the publisher permitted the public to assume that Byron was, in fact, the sole author.
Markovits's story begins, as it were, at the beginning of this particular imposture, on the day of publication of The Vampyre, at the door of the man who published it, and purports to describe events in the life of John Polidori, including his memories of that sojourn on Lake Leman. Appropriately enough, posturing and impersonating dominate it and raise significant contemporary questions about plagiarism, literary deceptions and the relationship between the author, his personality and the work.
John Polidori impersonates Byron. He does so in order to impress a young woman as the supposed author of The Vampyre. That he is, in fact, the true author is part of the joke. The young woman, in turn, poses as her own sister and hides her position as a governess in order to claim a spurious acquaintance with the man she believes to be Byron. Other forms of hiding and veiling occur, but the love story is central and ultimately leads Markovits away from what seems to be his original concept, a fiction about fictions.
The prologue adds another layer of hiding. In it we are told that Markovits merely inherited the manuscript of the novel from a teaching colleague whom he knew by what transpired to be a false name. Thus Markovits's authorial persona disowns the subsequent work, which we are told is "written rather loosely in what might be termed the style of the times" - an unsubtle pointer to the awkward prosing that inflates the main story, peppered with obtuse constructions ("far from unequivocal", "capable of almost any incuriosity") and deliberately heavy-handed description intended to suggest early 19th-century style: "His brow was high and noble in its way, with what seemed the print of an angry knuckle just above the strong line of his nose. His cheeks inclined sharply and, as it were, hungrily to his chin, but it was the quality of the skin that seemed most striking: smooth beneath the hairs growing out of it, pale, utterly childish." One aches to edit - to substitute "beard" for "hairs growing out of it", for example.
However, Polidori's failure, his narcissism and its bedfellow, self- disgust, his prudish distaste for Byron's antics and his own cowardly impulses towards the same libertinism are all acutely observed.
Markovits's Polidori is a complex character, but he emerges despite rather than because of the prose. Markovits brings a reputation for spare and accurate writing from his previous work; why he chose to hide his unfortunate doctor in this monster's body is a mystery.
• William Wall's most recent book is No Paradiso, a collection of stories, published by Brandon
Imposture By Benjamin Markovits Faber, 200pp. £ 10.99