Literally literary

THE UNLIKELY ESCAPE OF URIAH HEEP by H.G. Parry (Hachette, $25)

You’ll know the feeling. You finish a really satisfying novel and you feel a touch sad at having to say goodbye to its characters. Young (26 going on 13) prodigy Charlie Sutherland has the solution. He can do a Pygmalion: bring those characters off the page and into real life. He started doing it when he was 4, with The Cat in The Hat.

It’s a gift that Charley’s elder brother, Rob the Lawyer, wishes had stayed in its wrapping paper, especially when some of the more unattractive fictional folk start causing trouble in the ‘hood and it becomes evident that someone else shares Charley’s power and is using it for ugly ends.

That’s the inventive premise behind Wellington writer H.G. Parry’s boundingly energetic and agreeably empathetic first novel. Yes, the loathsome title character does escape; the story starts with his running — slithering, rather — amok on the ninth floor of Wellington’s “Prince Albert University”.

He’s joined — mostly in a secret shape-shifting 150-year-old street — by Dorian Gray, Maui, several Mr Darcys, Sir Lancelot, Heathcliff (who grabs every chance for a good glower), Dr Victor Frankenstein when he’s not working in the local morgue, the Scarlet Pimpernel, the Hound of the Baskervilles — aka Henry — plus many, many temperamental others.

Okay, you need to know a few books to appreciate the names fully but what’s wrong with that? Parry knows them: she’s got a

PHD in Eng Lit and has ingenious fun with her crowded cast. It’s not just clever quips. Illusions become unsettlingly substantial; conventional reality weakens. A brooding menace builds, partly through literary nasties who have enough malignity and misery to lift them above caricature.

A time of slavery and darkness threatens; Heep ominously calls it “a new world”. There’s concealment, betrayal, love, sacrifice, rescues and revelations. Charley and Rob battle on, halfhelped by fictional Millie, who’s limited by her creator’s prose (“Steady on, old thing”). The plot powers to a pleasingly ambivalent ending.

Like most fantasy novels, it’s ... well, it’s long. Plenty-double-plus happens. A few clever lines strain to be still more clever; a few conversations inflate into exposition. But it’s always engaging and increasingly rewarding. It’s great also to have a story that affirms the potency of reading. Maybe author and protagonist can have a go at grand opera next?