[Palace Without Chairs is] another of Brigid Brophy's "baroque" fictions—baroque in its droll verbal tap-dancing … and in its contrapuntal, obliquely affecting arrangements of unconnected tableaux: a taut debate on criminal insanity between a prosecutor and a psychiatrist; tea with Evarchia's only great novelist; a lecture on security at the Academy of Advanced Military Studies. Stacked up by a less crafty architect, such interludes might work only as satiric or didactic digressions. Here they bounce off one another with little pings of irony and gentle thuds of regret, reflecting Brophy's essentially compassionate and cautiously optimistic view of humanity caught between the death instinct—one by one the Evarchian royals succumb—and the Life Force.

But Brophy never writes a dry novel of ideas. The Life Force in Palace Without Chairs is embodied in the massive, teen-age princess, Heather. An unself-consciously hoydenish, unneurotic lesbian, she survives the collapse of...