All for Love

A chance encounter in 1895 between a princess and a debonair military man leads to a scandalous relationship in British writer Jacobson's woefully stilted 10th novel. Princess Louise, daughter of King Leopold II of Belgium, leaves her husband and embarks on an orgiastic spending spree across Europe with Geza Mattachich, a Croatian lieutenant in the Austro-Hungarian army, racking up debts and fraudulently securing a lease for "one of the most beautiful properties on the French Riviera," the latter giving Louise's family an excuse to imprison Mattachich and place Louise in an asylum. After long years of internment, both escape and are reunited, thanks to the unlikely help of Maria Stöger, a working-class woman who had an affair with Mattachich in prison. Jacobson, unfortunately, fails to capitalize on the story's dramatic potential and errs on the side of half-baked biography over taut narrative; footnotes and excerpts from the historical princess's and lieutenant's self-serving memoirs and other obscure reference materials clutter swaths of pages, and the prose rarely rises about lackluster. (Sept.)