I like David’s books and have read this twice, as it was a difficult first read with a lot of characters living in Merryking Close (and they are all dead by the end of the book!). I have never read Goethe’s Faust, but this was possibly a very sexed up riff or variant on that theme?
Arthur du Fluss, a lonely man who lives in Merryking Close has invented and made a fortune out of a game called Chancery, which is a variant on ‘truth or dare’. None of his neighbours respect or like him.
The Close is a den of sexual infidelity and resentments, and Arthur, it transpires, has murdered his wife and her lover after catching them in flagrante. He then kills himself but not before he has briefed the sinister lawyer Sepp Stoelheim to invite all the residents to his office to play the game, the prize to the winner being du Fluss’s fortune.
Whether at Arthur’s or the sinister lawyers instigation, the game results in them all implicitly confessing and as a result they all end up dead. Du Fluss remains in limbo, manipulated by the Mephisopholean Stolheim, who seems to manipulate everyone in the plot. Both the key characters have names that can transpose into Faust and Mephisopholes (I think).
Challenging to say the least.
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