Historical fantasy

The Kingdoms
By Natasha Pulley
Bloomsbury/ Paperback/ 436 pages/ $30.94/Available here
3 out of 5

Joe Tournier's first memory is of stepping off a train in 1898 in a city he thinks should be called London, but is instead Londres. He remembers nothing before that.

As he is dispatched in an amnesiac fog to an asylum, several things become clear to the reader, if not to Joe: He exists in an alternate history where France won the 19th-century Napoleonic Wars and colonised England, suppressing its language and enslaving its people.

British author Natasha Pulley gets very timey-wimey in her fourth novel, The Kingdoms, a knotty time-travel yarn.

While coming to terms with his existence as a colonial subject, Joe receives a postcard of a lighthouse on the Scottish island of Eilean Mor. It reads: "Dearest Joe, come home, if you remember. M." Mysteriously, it was posted 90 years ago but the lighthouse has only just been built.

When Joe eventually makes it to the lighthouse, he winds up kidnapped aboard a British navy ship from nearly a century ago. Its captain, the charismatic if psychopathic Missouri Kite, has been tasked to retrieve an engineer from the future who can turn the tide of the war.

The disconcerting confusion of Joe's experience is replicated to an unfortunate degree for the reader. It is like sailing through fog, albeit an exciting sort of fog where you can hear explosions happening around you.

That said, Pulley commands a stunning turn of phrase. Her surreal depiction of Eilean Mor is magical: a liminal space where tortoises browse in the pub and winter comes across the sea, freezing the water solid as it rushes by.

She also writes cracking good naval battle scenes, a must-have in any novel on the Napoleonic War.

At the heart of all this is a troubled love story that transcends time. It is worth the wait for everything to make sense.

• If you like this, read: The Watchmaker Of Filigree Street, also by Natasha Pulley (Bloomsbury, 2016, $19.94, available here). Her debut, set in Victorian London, tells of how Thaniel Steepleton escapes a bombing thanks to a mysterious gold pocket watch and decides to seek out its maker, the enigmatic Keita Mori.