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Laughter in the Dark’s one of, what Martin Amis called, Nabokov’s ‘black farces�. It’s cruel and perverse but often incredibly funny, laced with parody, and plays on the conventions of popular genres of its time. Nabokov takes a familiar, stock, scenario of the older man who leaves his family for a younger, predatory woman and turns it into a wonderful, satirical take on popular culture and Weimar Germany. From the start Nabokov emphasises style and perspective over plot, providing a fairy-tale style opening that outlines the tragic destiny of central character Albinus, a pillar of the German bourgeoisie whose submission to his barely-submerged passions leads to his downfall.

It’s a highly visual piece, Nabokov’s use of colour’s marvellous. This visual quality’s key to Nabokov’s deliberate subversion of the codes and style of then-contemporary cinema: from the vastly popular The Blue Angel whose plot informs aspects of Nabokov’s, through to Louise Brooks’s Pandora’s Box and Diary of a Lost Girl. A common theme in Weimar’s cultural outpourings was that of the ‘new woman� who comes to a bad end, art, literature and cinema was practically littered with the bodies of mutilated women. And Nabokov toys with the suggestion of a similar fate awaiting Margot, the working-class girl who capture’s Albinus’s affections: violence directed at Margot constantly surfaces in Albinus’s thoughts, pervading the novel. Albinus’s rival, the sadistic Axel Rex also complicates the plot. Yet Nabokov undermines expectations, he’s already made it clear Albinus will be the ultimate victim here.

Nabokov’s parody of cinema dictates the style and structure of numerous passages throughout the novel: the framing of images like Margot lounging on a beach; the portrayal of Albinus’s giddy, adolescent-style infatuation like scenes taken from a romance script. It's evident in his imagery, for example the way he foreshadows Albinus’s fate: the scarlet gleam of a cinema sign on a snowy pavement, the blood-red puddles, all connected to Albinus’s early sightings of Margot in her usherette’s job. Even the cinema’s name the Argus links to a crucial development later in the narrative. Although Nabokov frowned on social critique, and pokes fun here at novelists who adopted this as their calling, this works well as an expose of the decay in German society, particularly Weimar Berlin with its massive economic and social inequality. Albinus is an art critic but he falls for a wannabe actress, his supposedly heightened aesthetic sense more façade than substance. Scenes of a dinner-party for rather tarnished representatives of Berlin bohemia act as a skilful indictment of Berlin's creative industry and celebrity culture. Here Nabokov's technique reminded me of the style and bleak humour of Evelyn Waugh’s Vile Bodies but hugely exaggerated, pushed to the limit. His Berlin’s peopled with superficial, voyeuristic individuals, whose cherished desires are revealed as inauthentic at best. People whose lives may pass for art but are actually players in a lurid, second-rate, melodrama � with the possible exception of Albinus’s abandoned family who are swiftly relegated to relatively minor roles. But, Nabokov's approach also operates as a means of highlighting the artificiality of his own creation.

Laughter in the Dark was one of Nabokov’s least favourite books. In general, it’s considered a marginal work, regarded by some as interesting purely as a rehearsal for concepts only fully realised in Lolita: the possibility of “nymphophilia� in the affair between middle-aged Albinus and youthful Margot - constantly marked out for her schoolgirl appearance; the triangle that forms between Albinus, Margot and Axel as an early version of Humbert, Lolita, and Quilty. But I thought this had enough substance to make it worth reading for itself, without the need for constant comparisons with Nabokov’s later fiction. It's an arrogantly clever, annoyingly snobbish piece, but it's also extremely entertaining.