AT SEA.

The Song and the Truth
Helga Ruebsamen
Translated from the Dutch by Paul Vincent
Alfred A. Knopf, $26, 356 pp.

Here is a novel about a world that, no matter how broken, remains whole. Most of the action takes place during World War II and some of the principal characters are Jewish. But The Song and the Truth is not a Holocaust novel. Nor, despite the intricate layers and variety of spritual life and belief that are central to the story, is this properly speaking a religious novel. The Song and the Truth escapes easy categorization.

Lulu, a child, narrates the story which begins in 1938 in Java--a paradise, gorgeous, sensual and complete. There, in contrast to its biblical counterpart, innocence is neither a goal nor an ideal. Because of the narrator's extreme youth, however, innocence is present in the telling. An occasional flash forward gives Lulu the wisdom and perspective of more than fifty years, and replaces curiosity with knowledge when we need it.

Lulu's world is thickly populated. There are her mother and father, Helene and Cees; her mother's sister, Margot, and her fiance Felix, who is also Lulu's father's brother; Tinka, a teenager said to be Lulu's aunt, who is really more like a sister; and a nursemaid, Aleida, the only person whom the child does not like. Lulu's world is also filled with the supernatural: "night people," who are versions of real servants who work during the day, as well as deities, among them Christ, called "son of a god," the Buddha, and those who live in trees or streams. Ruebsamen keeps each of the godly and the human characters (many more than I have listed here) clear, distinct, and fully alive.

Much of the strong feeling The Song and the Truth arouses comes from the juxtaposition of Lulu's innocence and her shadowed, adult surroundings, both tropical and European. In both emotion and narrative, however, the most moving component of the novel is the love the child feels for the people around her. We know their clothes, the feel of their flesh, their expressive nuances, their tenderness for Lulu. We know their preoccupations and routines: the "tea ladies" in Java who enact colonial rituals; Helene's writing, playfulness, and discontent; the long hours that Cees spends at his obstetrical clinic, fulfilling the destiny set by his mother, an eventually famous couturier, whom doctors mistreated at the time of his birth because she was then poor and unmarried.

In the evenings Lulu's father reads letters from his family in Europe, each time pacing in fury and frustration, and then retreating to his study. He cannot bear to be apart from his Jewish family in France and Holland during their terrible time. And so he, Helene, Margot, Tinka, Lulu, and her baby brother leave Java, traveling on a ship called Garuda, named after the man-bird who was the god Vishnu's steed. Lulu, with Tinka as her particular companion, wishes for home but finds life mysterious on board, just as she did on land.

At one stop, her father disembarks to bring Benjamin Silberman, a famous pianist, on board. Cees loves Benjamin--who, it is eventually revealed, is his father. Helene despises him, and the girls befriend him. The old, and now frail, musician shows Tinka and Lulu a stash of shiny stones and tells them the treasure's existence is a secret. Only Mimi, Cees's mother, living in Holland, is to know.

When Benjamin dies the girls, in a misguided effort to carry out what they believe to be his wishes, throw his fortune into the sea. They are not found out, and the incident has no obvious further ramifications, but their act raises questions that become more profound and pressing when Lulu and Tinka, now in Holland, again act together in unintentional destructiveness.

After the journey, when the family is still living freely in The Hague, the two girls imagine--sometimes by discerning patterns and directions in a Persian rug--a scenario they believe will lead them back home to the Dutch East Indies. They carry out the plan, and death results. Here, as elsewhere, the novel's action poses ethical questions: If people are too innocent to foresee the outcome of their dangerous thoughts and activities, are they responsible for the result? What constitutes innocence? If one tries to help another, but in a secret, complicit way that leads to disaster, who bears the guilt? If the planners make their dreadful mistake because they lack wisdom and experience, are they at fault? How are they to bear the guilt that comes from such tragedy? How can other people help?

Ruebsamen allows for such reflection through the structure of her narrative. In just a phrase or two, the narrator alludes to the future while she keeps the reader focused on the present action. Similarly, she paradoxically maintains mystery through revelation, answering questions we have not thought to ask about the characters' history and formation.

Essential to The Song and the Truth is the palpable warmth of home, of Java, and the corresponding cold of foreign lands. One comes to understand those climates metaphorically as well as literally. Despite the often painful circumstances and events of Lulu's life, she emerges as a person who can fully recreate the emotional meaning of her story. From the very beginning, the beautiful, self-effacing language of the novel (Paul Vincent's translation into English is wonderfully colloquial and poetic) engages us. That, along with Ruebsamen's passion and intelligence, grips the reader until the end of the novel, and after.

Madeline Marget, a frequent contributor, lives in Newton, Massachusetts.