Glad rags and duffel coats

Gilver Memmer is a painter; brilliant, young, drop-dead handsome and stinking rich. He has superb taste and the money to indulge it, lives in Knightsbridge, drives an Aston Martin and owns three armoires stuffed with threads to die for: hand-piqued suits, Kurdish embroidery, silks "in a pleasing jacquard called the Memmer Ripple [...] woven in minute thread-dyed batches", pigskin gloves with sealskin turnbacks and "a peculiar long sharkskin box containing 10 pairs of evening gloves he never wore".

Ruthlessly selfish in bed, he is London's most eligible bachelor and least likely man to marry; Mr Darcy, in other words, with a supervised twist.

The Darcy comparison is almost explicit in Philippa Stockley's confident, assured and highly entertaining first novel, with the hero and heroine (for want of better terms) enduring a long misunderstanding before they finally get it together, and the heroine's fictional travails teaching her, as Lizzie Bennet's do in Pride and Prejudice, that "life was not a romantic novel, however attractive a prospect that might be".

Gilver descends from his pinnacle of success to a grotty flat in Ladbroke Grove where he drinks himself into a stupor and gets nasty marks on his merino coat. But he is still an object of fascination to women, for a wide variety of reasons.

Sweet-natured Alice wants to help him, his ex-girlfriend Eugenia wants to re-lay him and Juliette, the hard-nosed editor of a glossy magazine, wants to hunt him down and destroy him. Her motives for doing so are revealed about halfway through the story and show Gilver in a truly bad light from which it seems he can never recover the reader's sympathy. But it is part of Philippa Stockley's skill that she brings the novel round to not one but two modifications of our view: Gilver's behaviour is bad, but even worse is his inability to recognise it as anything out of the ordinary.

The girl whom he likes but overlooks for most of the novel is Alice, a rather hopelessly homely heroine in a duffel coat, who manages to give off an air of single motherdom. The nicely observed details of her unprosperous freelance life sit rather oddly in the same book as descriptions of extravagantly vampish Eugenia, an Austrian Countess in blood-coloured nail varnish who appears "sheathed in black leather so cruelly and accurately tailored, that her breasts challenged him like nose cones of rockets" and who vows her expected child will resemble her "however much that costs".

However much she knows the duffel coat must triumph, Stockley loves all things exotic and stylish and lingers over her nastier characters with relish (especially waspish Juliette, the woman with a mission), bringing them all together - in their gladdest rags, of course - for an operatic denouement in a New York art gallery.

The Edge of Pleasure is a vividly sensual novel, packed with colours and scents and textures evoked in language you won't have heard for ages, if ever: "guipered", " guilloche", "pave", "parure". It is no mean feat to have created possibly the most extravagant wardrobe in the whole of English fiction, as Stockley does for Gilver. It's a pity she couldn't endow him with art that was as credible. Somehow Gilver manages to get fabulously rich by painting attractive women reading books at cafe tables or attractive women posing as historico-religious subjects like Susanna and the Elders.

But perhaps it was wise to steer clear of installation art and extruded body fluids. If Philippa Stockley had made her hero into a sort of Brit-art god, her elegant romance would have been quickly hijacked into a satire on the current art scene, and she is already far too crafty a writer to have fallen for that.