Robert Fulford noted a few months back that a lump of Toronto writers – Ondaatje, Michaels – place their narratives amid the concrete pylons and thick sumacs of the city’s ravines. Add Carole Corbeil. In the Wings, her second novel, begins and ends there, an apt setting for a story about rifts, concealment, and loss.

A good plot is sticky, won’t go away or be resolved, clings; In the Wings won’t let go. Shakespearean from the start, the story is framed by a prologue and epilogue, narrator unknown. It isn’t until the book’s end that this voice is translucently revealed and the connection to Alice Riverton and Allan O’Reilly, Toronto actors who appear – almost – in a production of Hamlet, is clarified. The body of the book, though, is a play within a play, a mystery, and Corbeil’s craft maintains the puzzle.

There are good roles in this book, such as the wise-clown theatre critic, and each is given balanced, tight dialogue. These are theatre people, walking tragic flaws, and while Corbeil doesn’t quite express their intelligence, she makes their self-absorption purposeful.

Still, literary covers of The Bard’s hits are rampant these days, and the novel suffers from this versioneering: too many ghost allusions and death-of-fathers parallels. As well, some intrusive explanation of Hamlet seems silly next to the original.

The writing drips with figures of speech, as many as four to a page. Cows back away from Allan “like a great big bobbing tanker of flesh disturbed by a squall”; Alice was so weak she “felt like a gashed gazelle on the savanna”; Allan thinks of marriage “as if the finality of marriage would solve the poisoned arithmetic of his soul.”

Even these are forgiven when the book’s course is complete. At the close of the epilogue, Corbeil’s map returns to the ravines, and to the tick of determining whose story the reader has just unravelled.