THE CURE FOR LOVE

by Jonathan Bate

Picador , #15.99

This is a most rewarding read of a book; indeed, of a variety of books. Jonathan Bate, the

scholar, defrosted academically-iced Shakespeare in his exhilarating The Genius of Shakespeare. His literary essays and reviews bring literate empathy to erudite populism. The Cure For Love is his first novel. He layers plot with literary sub-plots. His narrative meanders across imaginary continents and centuries and has the mysteriously captivating quality of a bibliographic labyrinth.

William, amnesiac or recluse, is found wandering in an abyss in Scotland. Laura, his occupational therapist, tries to unravel his memory. This reveals the fact that his past is inexplicably connected to that of William Hazlitt (1778-1830). Hazlitt in 1820 became obsessed with Sarah, the sluttish daughter of his London landlord. In debt, he purged himself in a confessional essay entitled Liber Amoris (1823), The Book of Love. Hazlitt was a failed painter; an admirer of other minor artists. In a ''rigmarole on the couch'', his contemporary namesake focuses on one of Rembrandt's copyists. His sole surviving painting shows a solitary figure in a

canvas first entitled The Chemist In His Laboratory and then renamed A Philosopher En-gaged In His Reading.

The doctor and her patient search among these mnemonics of the past for clues to the present. They evoke the help of the neurological researches of the Russian psychologist Luria and find curious resonance in the philosophical writing of the American William James.

The main part of the novel focuses on ''conversations'' between the protagonists. Then, selectively, there is a transcribed life by William of a female called Sarah. The doctor's academic elder sister, Amanda, fishes for literary clues and, in an ''epilogue'', catches some beguiling red herrings.

This is all entertainingly engaging. The writing is tight and lucid, the dialogue sharp and often revealingly witty. This is a novel that reads as great fun to write - like the compressed diary of someone either blessed or afflicted with hypernesia (photographic memory) condemned to living in a library.

A final clue, with contagious elliptical curves, to the ''cure'' in the title of this literary thriller: William James was elder brother of the novelist Henry. The therapist in Bate's book considers the condition of ''fugue'' in relation to her subject. That is the psychological distancing of fact from reality. In a moment of paradoxic perception, of confused clarity, the ''lost mind'' in her surgery identifies William as the storyteller. Henry as the psychologist.