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She was no Emma, and no Anna

Anyone who loves literary game-playing and spot-the-allusion should read this: it's a cornucopia of intertexts and literary inversions. Martha may be no Emma (Bovary) or Anna (Karenina) however much she follows them in 'the adultery plot', but her make-up does include elements of Terese (Raquin) as well as the femmes fatales of many a noir potboiler. And poor Franz has his Raskolnikov moments as he imagines being followed by a police inspector and pursued by letters from his anxious mother... There are even foreshadowings of later iconic scenes (view spoiler)["Take the oar, hit him" reminded me irresistibly of The Talented Mr Ripley (hide spoiler)].

All this combined with the glittering prose style for which Nabokov is famous makes this compulsively readable, though I'd say the pleasures are almost all cerebral in comparison with some of his other books. There isn't the dark undertow of tragedy that we find in Pale Fire, for example, which gives emotional ballast to all the linguistic fireworks.

There's a lovely conceit which plays out throughout the novel of inanimate objects having emotions, life and agency ('the platform will begin to move past, carrying off on an unknown journey cigarette butts, used tickets, flecks of sunlight and spittle') which serves to disorient us delightfully as well as act as a contrast to the deliberately flattened characters of the human protagonists. The presence of 'automannequins', mechanical automatons that made me think of Coppelia, add to this spectrum along which sit predetermined movements and free agency. The characters are deliberately over-determined by their roles as prescribed by literary forebears: that 'king', 'queen', 'knave' of the title.

So this is perhaps the most playful of Nabokov's novels that I've read, though alert to issues of authoritative compulsion as Martha pushes Franz almost to his limits. I almost thought it was going to end in a certain way (view spoiler)[and that it was all going to be a dream (hide spoiler)] but Nabokov pulls back. Sparkling, erudite, alive to literary elements from 'high' culture to pop fiction (view spoiler)[Martha learns about poisons from her reading of crime fiction and, given the original date of writing, I couldn't help but think Agatha Christie (hide spoiler)], this doesn't have the tragic payoff of Pale Fire but is exuberant entertainment encased in scintillating prose.