Australia writer Kate Forsyth's latest book The Blue Rose is a French Revolution fantasy

Never mind that the main character in this novel has the extraordinary good luck to spend time in Versailles as a friend to Marie Antoinette while being a sympathiser nevertheless of the revolution. Despite her father being a marquis, or perhaps because of this, our heroine Viviane has a quick eye for injustice since he is the cruel grandee of many a fairy story.

Viviane begins as the chatelaine of a Breton castle that has passed to her through the maternal line, the beautiful medieval place known as Belisima. There, when left to her own devices, she grows herbs for medicines and is at one with the woods and the lake. But as a minor, she is subject to the tyranny of her father through his deputy, her great-aunt. Enter stage right the hero; an English gardener of uncertain class. His father was a preacher and Welsh. David has come to the château at Viviane's father's request to build a magnificent garden in the English style, to celebrate the Marquis' recent marriage to a noblewoman of fortune 40 years his junior. Of course David and Viviane fall in love in a picturesque if foreseeable plotline. But it is not to be. C'est impossible! She is betrothed to a philanderer twice her age and her father dispatches our hero with unconscionable cruelty. Melodrama and even a touch of masochism are the staples of historical fantasy and Viviane le pauvre! must become a Duchess at the court of Versailles, wedded to a reprobate Duc who does not care for her. Meanwhile, the English Gardener returns crushed to England and, as a protegé of Joseph Banks, sails with the British Ambassador to China seeking to discover the truly red rose of fable. European roses of the time flower only briefly, not repeatedly as modern roses do, and are not red but only varying shades of pink. It is China that holds the secret of the rose, as it does of many other beautiful and rare things at the time.

The British have an acute imbalance in their terms of trade because of this, and desire to do something about it. The strange historical coincidence of the French Revolution and the British East India Company's attempts to expand British trade into China are cleverly united in the one tale. Viviane's itinerary at court is brought to an end by the storming of the Bastille and the eventual imprisonment of the royal family. Through several narrative devices Forsyth places her heroine close to the historical action - meeting with M. Camiile Desmoulins early in the insurrection, being present at the Bastille fire while attempting to flee the Duc's house in the Marais, and returning as a prisoner to the Conciergerie where many aristocrats awaited their fate at the guillotine. David too lives events consistent with the historical record - the gathering of European traders at the port of Canton who were not allowed further incursion into the Middle Kingdom, the procession up the Yellow River of the delegation, their uneasy reception at the Imperial court and the eventual failure of the diplomatic mission.

The history of the French Revolution, the missions of the British East India Company and the biographies of its main actors have previously been exhaustively imagined, dramatised and recounted. In their own way, the British traders were changing the world as dramatically as the French revolutionaries, and the juxtaposition of the events makes an interesting setting for the story. If at times The Blue Rose seems perfunctory in its recounting of the historical detail, there is no lack of believable rapport in the telling of the heroine and hero's personal adventures.

Forsyth is known for her earlier historical novel Bitter Greens, which interweaves a retelling of the Rapunzel fairy tale with the true story of the French woman writer who first told the tale. We are told Forsyth "wrote her first novel at seven" which verges itself on a historical fiction, but perhaps this is the marketing department over-egging it. The Blue Rose comes closer to historical fantasy than historical fiction, accepting a view of things that follows the formula of the 'romance'. Although sometimes guilty of cliché in that style, it makes a good read.