MICHAEL ARDITTI is a novelist of rare gifts. In works as distinctive as Of Men and Angels, The Celibate, and Easter, Arditti has consistently demonstrated both enthralling storytelling skills alongside theological understanding largely absent among contemporary novelists. The Young Pretender is a fresh, witty, and ultimately moving addition to his oeuvre.

It is a fictionalised account of William Betty, a Regency Era child actor, who attempts to relaunch his stage career as an adult. As a child, Betty was a Society sensation, inspiring wild devotion among both the aristocracy and the wider public. His performances as Hamlet, Norval, and Richard III were so hyped that William Pitt once adjourned Parliament so that members might watch him perform. His fall from fashion at the tender age of 13 was just as dramatic as his rise.

Arditti’s evocation of Regency England is breathtaking. He captures its public figures and its modes of speech without turning the novel into a cod version of Austen or — worse — Bridgerton. The historical details — at one point, Betty and his sister visit Gunter’s for Gruyère and mint ices — are so skilfully handled that it is hard to know where the facts end and the fiction begins.

What makes this novel so satisfying is the way in which Arditti amusingly reveals the vanities and self-deceptions that drive Betty’s comeback without reducing him to parody. Arditti’s Betty struggles to remember details of his youthful success and the circumstances of his ultimate failure. The reasons behind this amnesia are unpacked so gently that the conclusion is genuinely moving.

This is a novel that will especially appeal to those for whom the theatre is a place of magic. It is a great novel about the theatre. It is also, however, a sparkling satire on the risks of celebrity. This satire speaks powerfully into our own celebrity-obsessed culture.
 

Canon Rachel Mann is Area Dean of Bury and Rossendale, Assistant Curate of St Mary’s, Bury, and a Visiting Fellow of Manchester Met University.

The Young Pretender: The dramatic return of Master Betty
Michael Arditti
Arcadia £12.99
(978-1-5294-2255-9)
Church Times Bookshop £11.69