It is the late 17th century, and King Louis XIV is at the pinnacle of his power. Versailles is the hub of the French aristocracy, a great beehive dripping with honey — and bristling with stingers. We are in the era of the great salons, the private gatherings where nobles and intellectuals converged to hon-hon the issues of the day. Clare Pollard’s work of historical fiction, “The Modern Fairies,” grants us entry into one such salon hosted by Madame Marie d’Aulnoy, a real-life salonnière and author, who has, as the story begins, mysteriously been rehabilitated after scandal and imprisonment.

The theme of Marie’s salon is fairy tales and proto-feminism. Each chapter, more or less, features a guest telling their version of a tale, most notably Charles Perrault, who will in time collect these tales into his famous volume, “Contes de ma mere l’Oye”: Mother Goose tales. In the opening chapter, Perrault begins a tale about a king loved by his people, feared by his enemies, and blessed with the most beautiful of wives and daughters. The guests lean in, eager to hear what misfortune will befall this perfect family. “For the energy that lies behind all stories is a destructive energy,” the narrator warns us, full of “the urge to burn down what is for what might be.”

If this sounds like Angela Carter rewriting “The Canterbury Tales,” you’re not far off. But “The Modern Fairies” is more than mere homage. Versailles is clutched in a desperate battle between Louis’s mistresses, and the collateral damage is only growing. As storms gather, the guests begin to use fairy tales as a way to speak openly — an increasingly dangerous game. To fall afoul of the king can be swiftly lethal, and the king has spies everywhere, overseen by his utterly sinister chief of police, Reynie.

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The Modern Fairies gather at Marie’s salon because there’s more honesty in fairy tales than in the cant to which they, as members of the aristocracy, must publicly subscribe. There are wolves in the forest. Hunger will make a parent abandon their children. Love can destroy you. Men do execute their wives for asking questions. Faced with the brutal truths around them, the guests in Marie’s salon want to believe in their own happy endings. Thus, they measure each storyteller by how well they stick the landing: They are savage to those who try to get away with sanctimonious morals or unearned happy endings.

Unfortunately, the novel’s most important storyteller is also its most frustrating element. Like Molière’s famous hypochondriac Argan in “The Imaginary Invalid,” “The Modern Fairies” is hobbled by its own crutch. Pollard’s story structure depends entirely on a narrator who can enter the mind of any character, no matter how minor. She refers to herself as “I” and holds her “dear reader” by the elbow in a voice that combines Jane Eyre and Lady Whistledown from “Bridgerton” — except that sometimes, her diction pitches into 2020s English.

The narrator describes Versailles under Louis XIV as a “panopticon,” a term which wouldn’t be coined for a hundred years, and wouldn’t acquire its modern, metaphorical sense until a century and a half after that. In a jarringly op-ed-like paragraph, she writes of “human sexuality being as wildly beautiful and various as it is,” and of organized religion as a “system of brainwashing.” “Brainwashing” and “human sexuality” did not exist in the court of Louis XIV, or any other Bourbon. These anachronisms continually disrupt the fictional dream of this novel.

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The same is true of the inconsistent — and patronizing — use of translation. At one point early on, Pollard invokes the Académie Française, “known as ‘les immortels’ after the academy’s motto ‘À l’immortalité.’ (‘To Immortality.’)” This smacks of distrust in the reader, but it happens with some regularity. Midway through the book, Marie d’Aulnoy tells a character “you are joining our group of Modern Fairies, Les Fées Modernes!” Marie, we know.

Worse, Pollard keeps us completely in the dark about just who this narrator is until the final chapter, a grave mistake. Had she offered this story up to Marie’s salon, the guests would have been merciless about this choice. They’d have pointed out that veiling a narrator’s identity in mystery requires A) that the narrator have a good reason for keeping it secret, and B) that when the secret is revealed, we suddenly see the story in a whole new way. Not so in “The Modern Fairies,” a book I would have enjoyed far more if I had not spent so much of it trying to figure out who was interrupting this otherwise galloping story. Was it a servant? A salon guest? Belle-Belle, the pet marmoset? No. It’s audacious and would be an intriguing idea — if it had been introduced by Chapter 2.

In its breadth and variety and ambition, “The Modern Fairies” can feel furiously grotesque, like one of the sybaritic nightly banquets Louis enjoys, featuring hundreds of dishes — at which the king himself consumes gargantuan meals, even though an oral infection has lately carved a hole in his sinus, meaning that food bubbles disgustingly out of his nose as he devours it. (He is also suffering from an anal fistula, about which we hear a great deal.) Pollard lays out more courses than we can possibly savor, yet each dish is exquisitely made — and researched. At its best, her writing is velveted with human insight, especially when it comes to the artifice of appearances: Her characters’ clothes and makeup are rendered with jarring precision. Pollard’s women do not apply lipstick, they lacquer their mouths with dyed animal fat; when they powder their faces, they do so with the white lead that scourges the skin it brightens.

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Ultimately, the finest moments in “The Modern Fairies” are not the most rococo or outrageous (the sex is graphic and abundant, but rarely pleasurable for the women involved) but rather the most intimate. A scene of Marie with her daughters and servants as they clean up after a salon is very affecting. Most encouragingly, the book’s third act is its strongest. “I cannot quite promise happy ever after,” the narrator warns us in the end, “not even an old storyteller such as I.” But rest assured: She sticks the landing.

Samuel Ashworth is the author of the forthcoming novel “The Death and Life of August Sweeney,” about the rise and fall of a legendary chef, told through his autopsy.

The Modern Fairies

By Clare Pollard

Avid Reader. 249 pp. $28

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