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Sylvia Harrison is an elderly, successful fantasy novelist from Montreal who has published 30 successful novels. She's had a life of incredible hardships and incredible joys, and she only made it through because she has a secret.

Sylvia has an imaginary friend - a playmate who's been with off and on her since her desperately unhappy girlhood - who acts as a sort of repertory actor in her books, stepping forward to inhabit her characters and give them life.

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That nameless, imaginary friend is the narrator of the novel (!). Sylvia is dying, and he wants them both to survive, and he has a plan. Sylvia's last novel is a final volume in her longrunning Ilyria novels, set in a fantasy version of Renaissance Florence.

In Ilyria, the Gods have made a pact with the wizard Pico and have left the world, and the people of the land now enjoy eternal life in an eternal Renaissance, where Progress has been banished from the world.

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It is to Ilyria that the narrator hopes to bring Sylvia and himself, where they might join the undying people of this eternal Renaissance, achieving immortality.

So it is that "Or What You Will" is two novels: the tale of Sylvia and her imaginary friend, and the novel that Sylvia is writing about Ilyria, in which the narrator has a starring role, inhabiting one of the lead characters.

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Ilyria is filled with characters out of antiquity and the Renaissance, and with Shakespeareans like Caliban, and "Or What You Will" is filled with breathtaking word-paintings of modern Florence and the ancient city beneath its modern veneer.

It's a complex stew of a novel, luscious enough to eat in places, with pockets of shocking bitterness and drama that give it such a rich and complex texture, somehow capturing both what makes novels so special and what makes Florence so special.

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