A woman friend of Karl Marx once observed that she could not imagine the author of Capital living in a truly egalitarian society. "Neither can I," Marx replied. "These times will come, but we must be away by then." Marx was a son of the bourgeoisie, and would remain so to the end, despite the revolutionary nature of his work. He was born in 1818 in Trier, in the Moselle valley, where his father, a lawyer, owned a number of vineyards. The descendant of long lines of rabbis on both sides of his family, the young Marx quickly rejected religion, and along with it the suffocating pieties of 19th-century middle-class Germany, yet throughout his life this philosopher of revolution and champion of the proletariat never sought to conceal his pride in the fact that his wife was an aristocrat, and, on the rare occasions when funds permitted, lived the life of un homme moyen sensuel; he was a roast-beef eater and a reader of The Times, a doting father and, with one notable fall from grace, a devoted husband. Late in life he even became a speculator on the Stock Market. He once famously declared, "I am not a Marxist," and reading Francis Wheen's fine new biography, one is inclined to take him at his word.
From the start he was a tyrant. As a child he forced his sisters to play the part of horses and drove them through the streets of Trier; according to his daughter, Eleanor, the sisters endured these and other indignities "for the sake of the stories Karl would tell them as a reward for their virtue". As a student at Bonn and later Berlin, he was something of a tearaway, smoking too much, drinking late into the night, and happily neglecting his studies. These years of debauchery may have permanently impaired his health; all his life he suffered from a debilitating range of ailments, from liver pains to boils on his bottom. These famous carbuncles he would grimly lance with an open razor, when his accustomed anaesthetic, arsenic - matter for a dreadful pun there, surely - proved ineffective.
At university he fell in with the Young Hegelians, though in maturity he was to reject what he saw as the Panglossism of the older Hegel's views on society and the state. He was an autodidact of unflagging energy. As a law student in Berlin he embarked on a vast treatise on the philosophy of law, while at the same time making detailed studies of everything from Aristotle's Rhetoric, which he translated, to Laurence Sterne's anarchic novel Tristram Shandy, a book which he loved all his life, and which, having abandoned his magnum opus on the law, he tried to emulate in a novel of his own, Scorpion and Felix, described by Franics Wheen, in uncharacteristically censorious mode, as a "nonsensical torrent of whimsy and persiflage". Marx had many friends - not a fraction as many, however, as he had enemies - but perhaps the most significant influence on his life, if not on his thinking, was that of his wife, Johanna von Westphalen, known to all as Jenny.
She was, says Wheen, "an intelligent, free-thinking girl who found Marx's intellectual swagger irresistible". Although she was already engaged, on meeting Marx she lost no time in freeing herself from her betrothed, and became his fiancee in 1836. Although her family belonged to the Prussian ruling elite, her father was a political liberal and a lover of high culture, an enthusiasm which he shared with Marx's father. Unlikely as the match may have seemed, Jenny adored her "little wild boar" - Marx was already hirsute, but far from little - and stuck by him through thick and, more frequently, thin throughout the years of poverty and unremitting toil that lay ahead. Hers was a truly heroic life; she was the quintessential woman behind the great man, fiercely loyal, tolerant of his tyrannous ways, humorous, resourceful and loving to the end. She bore him an extended series of children - three of whom died in childhood, to the inconsolable sorrow of both parents - and when he repaid her devotion by fathering a child on that other remarkable woman in his life, their housekeeper and maid Helene Demuth, she turned a blind eye, and remained a good friend to Helene for the rest of their lives.
Marx early discovered both the power of journalism, and his own gift for writing it. He founded newspapers with the energy and insouciance of one of the great press barons, though without any of their financial astuteness. He was a superb if rash polemicist; his baiting of the crowned heads of Europe made him a refugee in country after country, until eventually, in 1849, he settled in London, where he was to remain until his death in 1883. It may seem surprising that isolationist England, which, as Wheen observes, regards Abroad as "a strange and savage place where the natives piss on your shoes and eat garlic in bed", should have been so accommodating to Marx and the gaggle of revolutionaries who congregated around him; Wheen points out, however, that alongside the "bragging and xenophobia" there is another English tradition of internationalism, particularly among trade unionists.
Marx's circle in London - wild-eyed small tradesmen, for the most part, drunk on the egalitarian dream - might have sprung from the pages of Conrad, or even Dickens. Most remarkable of all his acolytes, however, was the urbane, well-heeled, faintly dissolute and fanatically loyal Friedrich Engels, one of the heroes, and certainly one of the most colourful characters, in Wheen's narrative. The heir to an international textile business, Engels took over the firm's factory in Manchester and moved there after Marx had settled in London. Had it not been for the financial support Engels provided over the years, the Marxes would most likely have starved. When Marx was old, Engels sold his Manchester factory and out of the proceeds conferred on his friend and mentor an annual pension of £350, a fortune in Marxist terms: "I am quite knocked down by your too great kindness," the otherwise not-overly-thoughtful philosopher wrote. The money cushioned Marx's last years, allowing him to lead the bourgeois life he had always considered his due.
At first glance, Francis Wheen is not the likeliest biographer of the founder of communism. He is a journalist, and a frequent guest on radio and television panel shows. His only other book is a biography of the Labour MP and sexual gadfly Tom Driberg. However, behind the veneer of stylishness, wit and light-heartedness, Karl Marx is a formidable piece of work. Wheen has read not only widely but deeply in the great man's works, something which not many commentators have done, and his account of Capital, that most daunting of doorstoppers, is nothing short of masterful - he has spotted, for instance, the levels of intentional irony which undercut the weightiness of the Marxist analysis of civilisation and its discontents. It is hard to think of anyone since Isaiah Berlin who has written so persuasively and so compellingly on Marx. No doubt the scholars will sneer, but the common reader, if such a creature still exists, will find cause here to rejoice.
John Banville is a novelist and Chief Literary Critic and Associate Literary Editor of The Irish Times