Tess Fragoulis’s first novel sets out to retell, without doggedly adhering to the original’s constraints, the ancient Greek myth of Ariadne, the daughter of King Minos, who gave her lover, Theseus, the thread that helped him escape the Minotaur’s labyrinth. A potent potion of superstition, religion, melodrama, mythology, and mystery, Ariadne’s Dream follows Ariadne Hatzidakis’s modern journey from Montreal to Athens and finally to the Greek island, Nysas, that plays host to her self-exile. There, prose, play, and snapshot-like images fuse into an amalgam of narrative techniques and sequential flashbacks.

Like an adjustable camera, the narrative offers both grounded and birds’-eye perspectives on love, death, and fate. Fragoulis’s adroit hand prevents the story from sliding into mere contrivance. When the plot’s seeming inconsistencies undermine the narrator’s reliability, the disparate threads are finally woven into one satisfying, secured knot. And when the reader wishes for more proof of the “grinning vertigo” of Ariadne’s “ongoing, obsessive and debilitating love” for her heroin-addicted boyfriend, Fragoulis delivers through the viewpoint of an interloping Medea figure.

Fragoulis especially flaunts her descriptive skill on the characters inhabiting debauched Nysas, island of Bacchic indulgence. Though some characters are peripheral to the action, each contributes to a sound glimpse of the Nysians’ “undiluted Greekness.” However, no mention is made of whether Ariadne, when engaging in at least three different types of high-risk behaviour, takes precautions to avoid AIDS, an oversight that rankles in a contemporary setting. Perhaps Fragoulis is playing off the novel’s exploration of fate here. This being a Greek tragedy, Ariadne is positioned as doomed at the novel’s outset, a fact that does nothing to contain Fragoulis’s whip-smart wit and engaging philosophizing.