Years ago, visiting the circus museum in San Antonio, Texas, I looked in amazement at General Tom Thumb’s exquisite miniature carriage – so delicate, so doll-like, so sad. The sight of it brought home to me the everyday reality of the strange life of a human being who was not just from another time, but from a group within the human race that had fashioned a form of success from disability and adversity.

Little People, a darkly romantic fairy tale with fantastic elements of nineteenth-century Gothic, is set in Australia in 1870. The central character, Mary Ann, starts out, Brontë-like, as a governess, but something more Dickensian-grotesque lies in wait for her. Pregnant by the father of her charges, she desperately seeks an abortion in the back streets of Melbourne. Unable to go through with it, she finds herself in the river, where she rescues someone who appears to be a drowning child. This person is, however, none other than Tom Thumb, the world famous circus dwarf who is touring the country with his troupe. Mary Ann has fallen into very strange company, indeed. But is she safe?

In an historical note, the author explains that the troupe did visit Australia for nine months in 1870 but that Mary Ann’s story is purely fictional. The two elements of history and fiction are woven together to produce the fabric of an action-filled story. The novel unfolds in chapters that are narrated by Mary Ann; other sections are narrated by the various midgets. (The correct term ‘pituitary dwarfism’ is given in the historical note, but not used in the body of the text.) Each section, presented as a ‘sideshow’, is prefaced by a black-and-white photograph of the relevant midget. The pictures are poignant, beguiling, and fascinating in themselves, but although they are a respectable postmodern device, I found them disconcerting. They constantly reminded me of the factual world of the troupe, while I was absorbed in the intricacies of the imagined saga of Mary Ann. The author, in her note, is frank about the distinctions she drew between history and fiction, but the appearance of photographs of the ‘real’ characters somehow undermines the ‘reality’ that I desired for the invented characters. A reader is willing to be swept up in the world of fiction: to be pulled back with a reminder that it is only fiction after all sets up an interference and a tension that do not serve the tale, which is, in this case, building to a climax far beyond reality.

Water is a dominant motif throughout, Mary Ann frequently being characterised as mermaid-like, with Tennyson’s 1830 poem ‘The Mermaid’ threading its way through the story in ways that are sometimes part of romance, and sometimes part of something very ominous. Mary Ann is a ragged Madonna figure. There is a sense of impending doom and disaster that Mary Ann can’t quite put her finger on, but it dogs her as she battles to survive and to guard the life of her unborn child. Hideous images of the so-called mermaids that used to be exhibited in museums and freak shows lurk in the muddy gloom that swirls through the narrative, seemingly waiting to swallow up Mary Ann and her baby. The unborn child is central to the novel’s plot, and has the dangerous quality of the messianic. Tom Thumb puts round the story that the child is his, conceived by some kind of electrical magnetism when he and Mary Ann were struggling for survival in the river.

The midgets’ nine-month sojourn in Australia is beautifully apt for the gestation of the baby, the progression of the pregnancy lending the novel much of its suspense. The reader is never able to forget that Mary Ann is pregnant. Tom Thumb and his wife, Lavinia, are also focused on this fact. Childless, the couple are known to borrow babies to dandle in photographs, and there is a deep fear that they are planning to kidnap the baby and to abandon Mary Ann. With a touching simplicity and innocence, Mary Ann is unable to credit such wickedness. She retains, through thick and thin, the blameless perseverance of a Jane Eyre type. But will she win through? In this bewildering world, where good and evil blend like blood and milk in water, will she ever work out who is her Mr Rochester? The reader can see, for the clues are consistently planted, but Mary Ann is blind to her destiny, and herein lies her almost fatal error.

The final section of the novel takes off rather like an episode of Dr Who, and builds to the wild conclusion, with all the elements coming together to amaze the reader. At the beginning, Mary Ann said she had ‘no idea how dangerous the world could be’. How right she was.