Ann Druyan isn't a household name, though she's had quite the varied career, either solo or with her late husband, Carl Sagan. Much of her work, whether it's in print, on television or film, or just out there in the real world, involves making science accessible to the masses. In fact, this was her debut novel and it was originally published in 1977, the same year that she served as the creative director for the Voyager Interstellar Message Project, which curated the golden records that are accompanying both Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 into space.

However, this book doesn't play in that ballpark. It has "a fantasy novel" emblazoned on the cover of the current edition from the University of Minnesota Press, and that's fair, but it doesn't mean dragons and orcs and dwarves. It looks deep inside the very process of writing, spinning up a story that's told from the point of view of fictional characters, most of them recognisable. The first has never been written, he says, but the second ends chapter one in style. "Call me Ishmael."

Marina is twenty-four, lives in Queens and dreams of chevron constellations, but she wakes up on a park bench in another city being asked by a stranger if she's William Shakespeare. Or maybe she might be Herman Melville. They've been waiting for him. Of course, she isn't. She's just Marina, a young lady with an unwieldy surname she's unwilling to share, even when the stranger introduces himself as Armando Pigowitz, who's really Roger Frommage. He's the character who's never been written, his name a huge inhibiting factor for any writer. He says that this place is known as In the Beginning.

The sweep of the novel could be considered to be Marina searching for the truth. What's going on here? Where is she, truly? Why is she there? However, it never seems that clean-cut. Nowadays, we might consider the mashing up of time-honoured fictional characters from the public domain into a story to be a goal in itself, but again that clearly isn't the point. This has no interest in treading the boards that Philip José Farmer and 'The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen' did. What I left the novel with was a wonder at Druyan was actually trying to do.

I found that it played best when it questions our understanding of reality, as filtered through the art of fiction. I enjoyed the poetic language and unusual phrasing from the outset, but lines such as "Every reader's red is really another color" spoke to me. It's a very different perspective play to Douglas Adams, but it finds deep truths just as well. Another favourite angle was the attempt to have someone from our world get across our perspective to the characters. When Marina gets an opportunity to speak with the committee, can she explain to them how readers read and firm up the concern that they may not finish? In return, many characters attempt to explain how they feel when they're read.

The chapters with the committee, starting in chapter four, are fascinating. They meet in the best Italian restaurant in town, Il Paradiso, which may be a reference that I failed to recognise, and all of them are famous characters. We've met Miss Havisham already, but there's also Moll Flanders, Willy Loman, Anna Karenina, Uncle Tom and Athos, thus trawling in authors from four nations and titles from three centuries. I hadn't realised that 'Death of a Salesman' was public domain. That's odd to me. Anyway, things have been building. Ishmael has endured a bad browse and vanishes at this point, when a Wisconsin student, Rowena Diamant, picks up her copy of 'Moby Dick'.

Things really come alive, though, when Roger finally tells Marina about Pearl. She's obviously the key to a puzzle, but we're never quite sure if it's the right puzzle. She finds her in the suburbs, not living among the archetypes but with the stereotypes. She refined the part she was given, telling all fictional characters that they don't have to be content with their lot. They can still evolve and grow. Marina pursues her, of course, and Roger does indeed find Shakespeare, who explains that nothing is too beautiful for words.

And so we're done. While I've skipped over a vast amount, I've taken you up to the final line of the book, which I may never have done before. This just isn't the sort of book that anyone can spoil, as it doesn't rely on progression of plot, rather the ideas it floats that may or may not resonate with us and which may well stand out in different ways over time. It feels like a book to read at various points in your life, whether you're a reader or especially if you're a writer. It didn't particularly hit me hard, but it hit me often and it planted seeds in my mind. I wish I'd have read it long ago and I was coming back to it now, maybe for the third or fourth time. However, it's fresh to me at a later point in my life and I appreciate it anyway.

Frankly, even if the ideas don't resonate, the writing might. It's beautiful prose, of the sort that's often more like poetry. It's obscure stuff and it seems to be happy to remain so, even in this latest edition, which presents its hundred and thirteen pages with large margins and without any extra material. There's no foreword and no afterword, nobody there to add interpretation or historical context. It just is, and it is in a magical and thought-provoking way. If you're like to be challenged by your reading, this is well worth tackling. ~~ Hal C F Astell