Douglas Glover’s ninth book, Elle, opens with a Rabelaisian scene of illicit fornication and vomiting. It is promising stuff – lascivious, bizarre, entertaining – and while much of the novel lives up to that promise, the potential is ultimately undone by some fairly basic errors in execution.

Loosely modelled after Marguerite de Roberval, the niece of French colonist Jean-François de la Rocque de Roberval, Elle is a young French woman bound for Canada on her uncle’s ship in the year 1542. In her own words, she is “a headstrong girl.” Despite an aristocratic upbringing and education, she is a hedonist at heart, with a fondness for sex. She is caught with her lover by her uncle, and the two, along with Elle’s nurse, are abandoned on the wild shores of the New World. The lover and nurse quickly expire, but Elle thrives in her own strange way.

The coarse style of the 16th-century French satirist François Rabelais informs the novel. Satire, the exposition of human folly through the exaggeration of human nature, is most effective when shaped around a core of human dignity. Compare, for example, Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels to Sir Thomas More’s Utopia. While Utopia is universally recognized as a brilliant work of political satire, Swift’s Gulliver has actually transcended the page to become part of Western mythology because his story is both more fantastic and specifically human – and thus more sympathetic – than anything in More’s Utopia.

But to Glover, it seems, there is no human nature with which to sympathize. He borrows Rabelais’ coarseness but undercuts the satire by making Elle a blank slate in the Canadian wilderness. All of her courtly European conditioning is conveniently useless amongst the wilderness and “savages.” This is the present viewed through the prism of the past.

The contemporary relativism of cultural theory informs much of this book. Unfortunately, cultural theory’s analytical modes can be described as satire minus the joke: where satire tickles and cajoles in its iconoclasm, cultural theory kills and dissects. As though working from a checklist, Glover subverts Elle’s character to pedantically assail the idols of culture: language, gender, religion, and so on.

Free from her conditioning, Elle has a child who emerges “sexless”; she professes to “no longer be beautiful, or French, or related to anyone”; she expounds on symbols and codes and questions the existence of God. Meanwhile the savages appear stereotypically noble. Great stuff, if only this were a doctoral thesis.

Terry Griggs’ novel Rogues’ Wedding expertly handled the same material with fantastically entertaining results. The key difference in approach is that Griggs, whose novel is set in the Victorian era, simply laid out a vision of the world – strange, complex, intriguing, and fluid – and left the reader to make leaps and draw conclusions. Glover far too often imposes an omniscient, explicating voice that functions like a thick glass wall between the reader and Elle.

By the time Elle is rescued after 10 years among the natives in Canada, she has reinvented herself as a dream creature, half-woman, half-bear. Apparently literally capable of transformation into a bear, she is a fascinating construction, with six teats, copious body hair and, as is learned at the book’s climax, the capacity for extreme violence. When she actually befriends François Rabelais back in France, the novel takes on a truly intriguing mythical richness. But it all comes too late and without enough narrative force.

Elle’s climactic and vicious revenge on her uncle, hinted at early in the book, comes about only by happenstance. Had Glover devised a more substantial artifice of narrative, by planting in Elle the objective of revenge and thus making her an active character, he would have likely provided a much more engaging rise to that preternatural climax.

Glover has a wonderful facility for imagery, language, farce, and the grotesque. At times Elle takes on a superb weirdness that makes it seem, as the publisher asserts, “a Brueghel painting in words.” It is unfortunate that Glover chose to undermine his own talent, and the promise of the novel’s story, by forgetting the basics in favour of a didactic and academic agenda.