THIS IS A MOODY and irreverent novel, probably best appreciated by post-adolescents who dress entirely in black and like to drink red wine and pretend it is blood.

Canadian author Jeffrey Moore came up with the idea for Prisoner In A Red Rose Chain while studying Shakespeare at Oxford University in England. In the library one day he picked up a copy of Encyclopaedia Britannica to check the reference on Shakespeare, and on the same page he found entries on Shaka, a famous Zulu warrior, followed by Shakespeare, Stephen Palsie and Shakuntala, the Hindu heroine of an erotic Sanskrit drama from AD 400. He was so amazed by the richness of culture on 'the Page' he used it as the basis for his novel.

In the first (and best) chapter, the child narrator Jeremy is blindfolded by his mother's ex-boyfriend Gerard and told to choose a page at random from a book. He tears out a page and Gerard tells him: 'You must never lose that magic leaf, Jeremy, it's your anting-anting, your flying carpet - it will take you wherever you want to go.'

The story then skips ahead 22 years. Jeremy, now living in Montreal, is still obsessing over the contents of 'the Page'. He's a university lecturer and writing a thesis on Shakespeare's A Yorkshire Tale.

He's fascinated with a half-Indian, half-Czech woman called Milena whom he believes is the elusive Shakuntala from 'the Page'. He's entranced by her dishevelled black hair, body odour, unshaven armpits and the 'night-black thundercloud' that hangs over her eyes. 'We have all known Milenas in high school,' he writes. 'The ones who watched gym from the sidelines in street clothes, who smoked in the toilets while the others were changing.' For her part, Milena thinks all Montreal men are 'hockey fans, liars or dolts'. She's bisexual, but Jeremy doesn't mind as long as he can watch. She's a feminist, but not that much of a feminist that she thinks cunnilingus is 'yet another power exercise performed by the male which reinforces the female's socialisation to passivity'.

It took Moore 10 years to write the novel and I kept thinking: in all that time, you couldn't come up with someone more alluring? It also gets very boring as he gushes on about Milena, while she treats him like dirt. The rest of the story wanders around Jeremy's various paranoid obsessions. The man next door commits suicide, or perhaps it's murder. There are brushes with drug addicts, child molesters and other misfits, and Jeremy insists on trying to use 'the Page' to make sense of it all. The storyline is pitch black, but saved from being depressing by Moore's wise decision not to take himself too seriously. The narrator is a neurotic self-effacing character, the kind that never gets the girl, and he wrings pathos and humour from each event.

Although just published here, Prisoner In A Red Rose Chain first appeared in Canada in 1999, and won the Commonwealth Prize for best first book in 2000. The judges praised it for capturing the quirkiness and anxiety of contemporary urban life.

There is a message of sorts in the book. Something about how we make choices based on random facts. But the main impression I took away is that Moore just finds shadow more fascinating than light.

No doubt Shaka Zulu, Shakespeare and Shakuntala would agree.