Metempsychosis is the transmigration of a soul at death into the body of another being. The plot of this novel turns neatly on an incident of metempsychosis. I don’t wish to explain what happens, because one of the charms of the book lies in that moment, and readers must be free to enjoy it.

Maurilia Meehan is a playful writer, one who invites her readers to enter into a game with her. The basis of the plot here is in fact the writing and performing of a play. Instead of putting on yet another annual performance of an Alice in Wonderland pantomime, players in the Melbourne suburb of Northcote are going to do a play written by a woman called Bette. The play concerns the story of an Olympe de Gouges who campaigned for liberty during the French Revolution.

The parts of the plot are held together by four words, Off With Her Head – words common to the Revolution and Lewis Carroll’s Alice. Words, in fact, are perhaps the principal subject here – Olympe is a writer of plays and pamphlets, and comes to grief because of her ideas and words. She meets Wordsworth briefly, and in the modem day parts of the novel there is an important computer (word-processor?) game about the Lewis Carroll Alice. Words and women - they are the big things here. ‘I put forward a thousand ideas. They will not listen because I am a woman’, Olympe says. Imagine the words ‘Fatal Error’ coming up in red on your screen, and meaning it. Maurilia Meehan likes to play with contexts.