Gaveston Stephanie Merritt Faber and Faber, 386pp, £10.99 ISBN 0571210554

Stephanie Merritt's deliciously dark debut novel has an unusually erudite cast of characters: academics, novelists, intellectuals and people who work in the media - people who use words such as autochthonous in casual conversation, and can provide casual exegeses of Gildas of Strathclyde's De Excidio Britanniae or Nennius's Historia Britonum. They are also an unusually evil bunch. Merritt understands that true villainy can be achieved only with limitless finances - her first bad guy, Sir Edward Hamilton Harvey, is a multimillionaire media baron who enjoys being known as "the dark one". Merritt's heroine, Gaby Harvey, is described as "a princess of the Evil Empire," and the man with whom she is obsessed, Piers Gaveston (clearly an allusion to Edward II's epicene favourite, last fictionalised by Christopher Marlowe), reminds another character of Milton's vision of Satan. The glamorous life that these characters enjoy suggests, in the most enjoyable way, an episode of Dallas co-written by Iris Murdoch and David Lodge, and directed by Ingmar Bergman.

The battle between high and popular culture is one of the obsessions of the novel. One character argues that mass culture is an illusion. Sir Edward Hamilton Harvey buys up the university where Gaby studies Arthurian legend to create a place where media studies carries the same weight as the more traditional subjects. Merritt's characters talk so much that it is hard to decide where the author stands on this matter. In any event, she seems to have a stronger command of literary history than of credible pop-cultural references, although this may be a deliberately mocking portrayal of what academics choose to celebrate as cool. Certainly, Merritt is shrewd enough to know that the debate about high v low culture is a tired one, but also knows, in the end, that it is fair enough to suggest, as one character does, that it is more valuable to study Blake than the modern newspapers.

Midway through Gaveston, Merritt ups the sexual stakes to a point many will find uncomfortable. The main plot in the first half of the novel - running alongside various mysteries concerning an author killed after receiving a large advance for a book about US arms exports to the Middle East during the early 1970s - concerns the developing romance between Piers Gaveston and Gaby Harvey. But then, one night, a coked-up Gaveston violently sodomises Gaby and laughs as her bottom bleeds. Although this makes Gaby angry, she continues to intellectualise what has happened to her, telling herself that she has no problem with anal sex, and that if Gaveston had only asked, she would have been willing to give it a go. She also considers herself a victim of misdirected rage; but rather than avoiding him, she wonders how she can help him get over it, and masturbates to a fantasy version of the unpleasant evening. This is not a conventional romance.

In fact, it is not a romance at all. Although Gaby and Piers become engaged, they are not destined to be together, as the mysteries in the first two thirds of the novel slowly emerge. Issues of class, politics, Englishness, media machinations and the power of the establishment predominate: the sexual obsession disappears into the background. The long final section takes place six years earlier, showing the origins of the violent emotions that power the present-day action. It is in the final third that Merritt shows she has a future beyond this one novel.

Although Gaveston is densely packed with information, that is never at the expense of good storytelling. My only criticism is that Merritt's prose, though always clear and full of detail, can be a little colourless. She knows the worlds she describes, but is sometimes slow to animate them fully; the weakest parts of the book are those that lapse into straightforward satire. Oh, and she is a little too fond of surnames that describe a character's personality (Mr Bland, etc). Then again, given her own surname, perhaps that is understandable.

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