A blend of the historical and the speculative to linger on the concept of duty in a grim and everchanging world.
The viewpoint character of Lara Elena Donnelly's novella No Such Thing As Duty is William Somerset Maugham. You might have heard of him. An English writer who penned plays, short stories and novels, I certainly had, but knew very little about him beyond that briefest of bios. Nor did I until after I had finished writing my first draft of this review - a deliberate choice, wanting to preserve the experience of the story as a narrative-object, to linger in its tension and ambiguities, without collapsing them down with the intrusion of reality until I had at least captured the rough sense of my feelings in the amber of prose.
Because there are two No Such Thing As Dutys - the first is the one read by someone who knows Maugham's bibliography, the facts of his life and the reality, date and manner of his death. This is a version one must expect of any book which features historical facts, in any form. There is always someone who knows everything, especially when the subject is a famous author. The second is my experience.
At the start of the book, we meet Maugham arriving in a Romania in which he is certain he will die (and glad of it rather than being a Scottish sanatorium). He is suffering from tuberculosis, dizzy with fever and coughing up blood, but seemingly determined to do his duty before succumbing to the inevitable. Already, a branching point of the two experiences of the story. For me, this is tension - does he die in Romania? I don't know. He seems wearily certain of it, a spectre that looms over the story, that intrudes every time he coughs up blood into a handkerchief or a scarf conveniently dark to hide the stain. Arriving as a spy in wartime, he reports in to receive such mission as he might be needed for, following on from his promising activities with less promising outcomes in other fronts of the conflict. But he soon realises his mission, such as it is, seems more of a sop, a bone thrown to make him feel useful rather than something vitally necessary.
And thus, the central conflict of the book. The duty he's doing - to King and Country, as he says - what kind of duty is it, if it is this pity mission? He leaves behind a daughter he cares about and a wife he'd rather avoid, coming to die far away, and if it's not for duty, then what is it for? Are they not also a duty?
But he's there, and the mission is in front of him, and he's dying, so do it he does. And through the course of it, he meets two other key figures. One a man, Walter, seemingly walled off from any sense of duty - seemingly - and another a woman, Mme. Popescu, whose husband died of a duty he didn't even need to do. Three angles on the same problem, though mired firmly in Maugham's. The glimpses of the other two do however serve to colour and explore his, through the lens of his introspection.
And this - his self-critical, thoughtful, writerly narrative voice - is one of the most successful things about a roundly successful novella. I'm not familiar with Maugham's work in reality - another branch point, does his narrative voice sound like actual Maugham's - but I found myself quickly invested in the version of him that exists in Donnelly's. There's an analytical bent to the way he talks about the people around him, a distance that he himself names as he talks to other characters, and a slight rigidity to the prose that does nod back to the time at which the story is set, without overegging the historicity. But it's not just that. He is constantly dwelling on his imminent death (ironic or simply foreshadowing?), the effect that will have on his family, whether being here is the right thing to do, and if he even truly is doing his duty at all. He also dwells on two lost loves and one growing one, because all good things come in threes.
As with the three angles on duties, the three loves all inform one another, shaping how we see Maugham as much as how he sees himself. There's Sue, the woman he wishes he'd married but whom he lost to the man who got her pregnant (and married her out of - yes, there's duty again). There's Gerald, the outgoing soldier he knew in the Pacific, whose strengths shored up Maugham's weaknesses, and whose flaws could be forgiven, and critically who knew, as Maugham knows, when and how to keep hidden from society's eyes what it doesn't want to see. And then the present one, Walter - the man who walls himself off from duty, who refuses to hide himself as Maugham knows he must.
Intersections, wherever you look. Maugham - with his stutter, his orphan status and French early years already an outcast, clinging on to rigid propriety as close as his interpretation of duty. Walter flouting both but charming him in, while also being his mission, a part of his own duty and bound up in the death of Popescu's husband.
All of which leads to wondering about the reality of Maugham's duty - the clue is, indeed, in the title - but whether it's self-imposed too. All around him, people take the rules of society less seriously than he does, whether they be his British handler, the locals, Walter or Mme. Popescu. He dwells on how it was his duty to marry Syrie, the wife he's avoiding, after he got her pregnant. But was it truly? Was it a duty he could have avoided if he wanted to? Did he want to? Will he die in service to this thing that may never even really have been asked of him at all?
That tension and uncertainty about his death is why I resolved not to find out his biographical details until I had settled my thoughts. Because the poignancy of not knowing felt so delicious, and fed in so beautifully to the ethical crisis he was suffering through, that I wanted to treasure it as a lucky gift I chanced to have in reading it.
However, around half to two thirds through the novella, Donnelly introduces a speculative element which complicates things further. Obviously, there were no vampires involved in World War I. And so, however closely the narrative up to this point may (or may not) have married up to the real history and biography, here it diverges. The two experiences of the book briefly coalesce. But only briefly.
In my opinion, vampires are at their best when they are both truly dangerous and also, despite and because of the danger, sexy. In No Such Thing as Duty, the sexiness of the vampirism (and while a little understated, by god is Donnelly's vampire sexy) is corralled in by the physical - blood and bites and hands and tongues - just as the rest of the story is wedded to Maugham's own physicality, of his breath and cough and bleeding, his fever constantly waxing and waning, the scratch of fabric on skin, his enjoyment of food and drink. Donnelly revels in the sensation of drinks particularly, the haze of brandy and heat of coffee, and temperature more broadly - feverish burns and the cool touch of snow. And again, the lingering prophecy of Maugham's death informs this. We read his body in its frailty and potential failure; the vampirism marries that imminent death up with sex but also with the potentiality of death's forestalling.
And so, the two readings once again diverge and split even further. Is the intrusion of the fantastical about to change the facts, and a reader who knows whether Maugham will die about to be surprised by a change, or have their knowledge come to fruition, but its method shifted? And then, again, me, caught up only in the tension of the story itself. Vampires throw a spanner into the works of the greatest inevitability, and so add an extra layer of narrative uncertainty.
Right up to the end, Donnelly preserves that ambiguity. The story ends with implication rather than closure, a situation that made me very glad for my lack of knowledge, but one that, precisely because of the speculative elements, likewise imposes that ambiguity even on a reader who does know, because while the question of "if" might have been settled for them, there still lives a vast expanse of "how" and "why".
And so, ultimately, it doesn't matter if you know the facts or not. The story uses vampirism to crack open the vault of possibility, and ensure that the available endings are uncertain for any reader. I looked up the facts, and learnt that not only did Maugham live into his nineties, far beyond the scope of the life he sees as doomed in the story, but that even the foundation of the story rests on a branch untaken - the Scottish sanatorium the book's Maugham is glad to avoid was the path of reality. A reader who knew his biography was already wrong-footed, because it never cleaved to that reality in the first place. That break from the known path already introduced the potential for change, and the story could become one of the doomed path the real man didn't take.
No Such Thing As Duty wields its ambiguities and potentialities like a scalpel, all the while holding them in delicious contrast to the bitter realities of the physical and the flesh. By using a real historical figure and divorcing him from his reality, Donnelly ties her story to real anchors - there are hints and nods to real, biographical facts seeded throughout - without closing off the opportunities for tension, and the scope of possible endings. The fantastical element is also the most grounding one, the sections in which Maugham is being fed on being some of the most intimately real ones, where much of the rest of the story comes filtered through his particular lens of perception, held at a distance, or made hazy by illness. Only in contact with the unreal does the story fully rear up into feeling quite present. She leaves her questions open - this is not a story with an answer to its moral questions, any more than it is one to set a firm hand on the conclusion of its plot - and the work is all the better for it. It is a beautiful, brilliant book, with exquisitely understated prose and a skilfully managed viewpoint, and one that exemplifies what a good novella can do, or be, by using all its tools, figures and ideas all intersect and coalesce into a gorgeous mess of feeling and thought.
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The Math
Highlights: Sexy but understated but sexy vampirism, triangulating around the concept of duty, well-crafted introspective viewpoint
Nerd Coefficient: 9/10
Reference: Lara Elena Donnelly, No Such Thing As Duty [Neon Hemlock, 2025].
POSTED BY: Roseanna Pendlebury, the humble servant of a very loud cat. @chloroformtea.bsky.social
