Occasionally after you have read a book that pleased, baffled, irritated, or bored you, someone points out all the subtleties, virtues, and faults you have missed. This could perhaps happen to readers of The Rose Crossing.

We know from Anna Russell that in opera it doesn’t matter what the characters do so long as they sing it; the same could be said of novels, providing the author can convince us. On the surface The Rose Crossing is a tall story set in the seventeenth century, in which, as in a fairy tale, people you don’t believe in behave in an unreal way and get into preposterous situations. They make stagy ‘period’ speeches, they don’t engage our sympathies, they sometimes creak when they move.