Marie-France moves from being a young girl in a convent, to a student in a dance academy, to a nurse in a truly surreal hospital, to a kind of washerwoman and, finally, the mother of a baby boy. She sees the nuns in her convent as ‘broken cuckoo clocks’. After a year she moves out into the world to embrace the joys and dangers of the flesh.

The chapter headings ‘Emmanuel’s Water Music’ and ‘The Bridge of Avignon’ track this narrative, but the chapters are contained within sections titled ‘Contraction’, ‘Transition’, ‘Birth’. The novel articulates the physical, emotional and spiritual realities of a woman’s pregnancy and childbirth. Both levels are signalled by the illustration on the book jacket: an engraving of a beautiful nun baring her voluptuous breasts. The image is compelling but misleading since this is not the story of a nun who gives birth to a child. The final image is that of Marie-France and her husband and son as the Holy Family, receiving gifts from the nobles of Vienna. So, at another level, this is a secular version of the Virgin Birth, occurring in Europe at the time of the Enlightenment. Light ‘wraps a golden thread’ around the family — this is the closing image of the text. When Marie-France was very young, the thing she feared most was childbirth. By the end, she has faced this fear. She imagines herself as ‘a high priestess of France’s new Goddess of Reason religion’.

There is a constant pull throughout the text towards pregnancy and birth, and towards the idea of the bond between mothers and children. The narrative is told in the voice of Marie-France, and the sensibility is that of a woman who can see when events and circumstances are marvellous and extraordinary, and who can accommodate what she sees. In the underwater hospital, ‘domestics in sealskin skirts, their whalebones compressed into propeller fins at the back, glided through the rooms’. In all the twenty years of its existence, the underwater hospital records only one drowning. A lion cub appears in a cage with the afternoon mail. Wisteria grows in France fifty years before wisteria was named. Girls wear garish pink sashes to their First Communion. Life is so lush and vivid. Qualities of fairy tale, dream, Freud and Lewis Carroll mingle and merge, as in the work of a surrealist painter. This is visual writing, delighting in image and, in particular, revelling in colour.

Imagine a woman wearing a dress (this novel is very much concerned with clothing), a faded green dress, to sit for a painter. The artist smothers the dress in dark green paint. Another time a magician blows on a crimson silk dress which wraps itself around the woman, fitting itself to her shape. Music is another guiding motif, as Marie-France follows her carefully named cousin Emmanuel to Vienna, where she hopes to marry him. People hide in bells and make arrows from the bows of violins.

Another dominant motif is that of the key, with its many significances. In a sense, this is a mystery narrative: the reader, searching for the key, is frequently offered one, only to have it snatched away. But the great, guiding motif is that of water. The first watery catastrophe comes when a young woman dies in childbirth. Her waters broke and ‘it was as though her body evacuated all the fluid there ever was in it, and, after doing so, began to draw on all the waters of the world’. Waters of all kinds flow gloriously through the story. At the end, when the boy is born in Vienna, ‘the rain is pelting down’.