When Lord Byron published Don Juan, his satiric novel-in-verse in the 1820s, it is said that carriages blocked the streets outside booksellers as each new chapter was released. Witty, adventurous, and erotic by turns, the suspense-filled books told of the life and loves of Don Juan, in places ranging from England to Greece.

John Newton’s Escape Path Lighting is also a poem of satirical novelistic design – although the cover bills it simply as ‘a novel’. The text is definitely spaced as if it were verse but is it verse enough? Satire is also a hard act to pull off, requiring the reader to have an interest in both the subject and the satiric turn.

Escape Path Lighting is set on Rock Oyster Island, a place bearing suspicious similarities to Waiheke in the Hauraki Gulf – though whether the island actually requires satire is a moot point. With its real-life regular boundary conflicts between land-owning lesbians and developers, nude beaches, faux-vineyard wedding venues, and private helicopter owners and unemployed dope-smokers living in claustrophobic proximity, Waiheke needs little exaggeration.

The book effectively begins as Arthur Bardruin swims ashore on a starless night – “a turkey-necked Venus / some two metres tall and stark bollocky / nude!” He is a fugitive poet on the lam from the Continence Police, yet another outsourced state agency. The island he encounters is the last refuge of the rambunctiously disreputable and the intellectually vagrant.

Newton’s cast of characters is large – but to the reader’s relief there is a useful two-page list at the book’s beginning. Marigold Ingle has a medicinal herb stall at the Saturday market – and a gossipy Spanish-speaking parrot, Chuck, with his own opinions. She will eventually receive Bardruin, feed and clothe him.

At the Blue Pacific Wellness Farm, Juanita Díaz, Lacanian analyst, has a session once a week with Frank Hortune to probe his dreams and his complex relationship with his mother. The BPWF’s chalets also provide residences for yoga and poetry instructors.

At nearby Shady Grove, there are hospitality workers, meth-heads, and elderly bikers. Wirimu Te Patu runs the General Store – Koru Bill’s. Simon Richwhite, architect, has a gigantic SUV and an offensive jet-ski. The Sandgroper Lounge provides alcohol and features local bands.

The arrival of Bardruin, the cast-away poet, ignites this melange of humanity and Newton records the consequences. Relationships begin and end. Fine wines are drunk. Marijuana is smoked and glass meth-pipes are purchased.

A poetic novel is an unforgiving form. Newton does not entirely succeed. At times Escape Path Lighting is simply prose with broken lines. Elsewhere, Newton displays a fine sense of rhythm. The set-pieces of a beach-party under macrocarpas, drinks in the Sandgroper and the climactic poetry-reading at the Swordfish Club with its featured finale by Barduin are all effective.

Unfortunately, the poem often feels dated, along with many of Newton’s targets, including Lacanian analysts. It is a voice from the past, aiming at last decade’s news and personalities. The cast of alternative life-stylers do nothing for its sense of relevance.

One of the joys of Byron’s Don Juan is that his sharpness is still perceptible and his rhymes can shock and titillate a reader two centuries later. Byron’s satire is still as fresh as the day it was written. Escape Path Lighting offers its reader no similar surety.

Reviewed by David Herkt