Modern feminist dialogue wears ladylike veneer

This verse novel is different from Diane Fahey's earlier work, but the continuities are striking. What Fahey does best is immerse herself in a world and dialogue with it. This time the world is turn-of-the-century Britain, refracted through a genre — detective fiction — much-loved by the poet.

It will be difficult for bookshops to house the book as its genre is wonderfully hybrid: crime fiction/poetry. The work has some of the trappings of a classic of the genre, Agatha Christie's Murder on the Orient Express. As in Christie, a part of the charm in Fahey's verse-novel is its surface, a veneer only, of ladylikeness.

That it is a veneer only becomes obvious when the other participants of the carriage don't act like the usual assemblage of falsely accused suspects. Something else is afoot, and this is where this new addition to Diane Fahey's corpus has links with her past writing. It's a feminist dialogue about confinement in marriages that plainly don't work, best symbolised by Dolores, the Amazonian macaw, who is one of the most engaging characters in the verse-novel:

Mulch carpet, and chandeliers of leaves hanging from hot blue — I played the distances between them, my scarlet and yellow cries filled the rainforest's dripping voice-box. I was kidnapped, taken to live inside a closed collective mind — among porcelain sylphs and swains, stuffed owls, aspidistras. The eyes of peacock feathers gleamed by altars of heaped rubies, and died with them: transposed, like myself, to paraphernalia. an exiled Amazon queen, I gazed through gilt bars, the gift of speech my only joy.

It is delicious when symbols, for instance, Dolores who is a prisoner of an overstuffed Victorian treasure-house, do double-service as characters and contributors to the argument. The verse novel articulates a very modern feminist take on sexual and actual violence within marriage and shows a number of steely women taking the action necessary to escape abuse.

However, it is not for the plot that one reads such a work. It is the texture of the pastiche, the understated poetry, the elegantly handled argument, the exotic characterisation and the refractions of particular characters through other characters' perspectives.

I relished the submerged plots about the vengeful third wife and her villainous, chilling spouse, and the invented works by Rosa Moreland which are another way of splintering and refracting the concerns of the