The Fourth Queen by Debbie Taylor

How a Scot became queen of the harem

Debbie Taylor, the editor of the literary magazine Mslexia, has produced a first novel of impressive energy and boldness: a weird and sumptuous historical hybrid that gallops through romance, adventure and sheer horror. The plot is bizarre yet based on a true story, that of a 17th-century Scottish girl who ran away to embark for the colonies, was captured by pirates and sold into slavery in Morocco. Her milky skin and red hair made her a natural for the emperor's harem, where she became a favourite, then a wife.

On this frame hangs the tale. At first Taylor juggles two worlds: the boat on which the nervy but ambitious Helen has embarked, a place of filth and degradation; and the lush perfumed nightmare of the harem, lavishly described in the journal of its overseer, the dwarf Microphilus – himself a long-captured Scot. Here live a thousand women, four of whom are queens. Flowers cascade, birds sing in cages, the air is spiced, coloured veils waft upon the breeze. This "pretty prison" is a girls' school rife with bullying, a miniature town of lazy, sluttish women waddling around with their pampered children, gossiping, sleeping and painting faces.

They are stock. "Every new acquisition is subjected to an obligatory fattening," and Helen is duly stuffed with rich food and instructed in the art of pleasing the emperor. As well as the women and eunuchs, there is a palace staff of slaves, whom the emperor mates to produce "giant cubs" for fighting. Malia, a formidable crone with one very long hooked fingernail for performing abortions, "keeps notes on the pedigree of his entire herd".

The harem seethes with intrigue. Someone is trying to poison the emperor's wives. Sorcery is suspected. Helen's friend, the defiant Naseem, is gathering a coterie of female lovers. The dwarf nightly makes love with Batoom, "the Black Queen, tall and magnificent, gliding gracefully along, barefoot, barrel-arsed, with her water jar on her head".

His affections, however, are soon straying to his countrywoman, the bewildered Helen. She in turn falls in love with the emperor, equal parts charming lover, tantrum-throwing toddler and psychopath.

Here and there Taylor lapses into banal soap-opera dialogue and awkward exposition; she's also guilty of a few anachronistic clunks, mostly in modernly expressed attitudes that simply don't ring true. Taylor has great panache, however. The pages turn, the book rolls along, from gloopy sentiment to slurpy sex to stark horror that, at one point, had me turning aside.

In full flight, the prose soars. After days of rain, "The harem smells of moss and mould as our stocks of firewood burgeon forth with all variety of mushroom, and the rush mats take root and sprout green beards... The slaves are forever sweeping up fallen leaves, which seem imbued with glue and coalesce in slimy heaps which must be scraped up... Thus does the Green Queen reclaim her dominion". This is a lush, sinister book, which I enjoyed tremendously.

The reviewer's new novel, 'Turn Again Home', appears next month from Virago