Ancestral Truths.

English novelist Sara Maitland must thrive on the heterogeneous allegiances that mark her life. She is a committed feminist and political progressive. She has reviewed a large number of novels and theological works and an even greater number of science and math books. Maitland was raised in the Presbyterian Church of Scotland (her mother was national vice-president of its Women's Guild); in her twenties she joined the Church of England (her husband is an Anglican vicar). Last year she was received into the Roman Catholic church.

All these various allegiances bear on her work: in 1983, for example, moved by her feminism and her love of the church, Maitland wrote a nonfiction study of woman and Christianity titled, A Map of the New Country. It is a measured and pained look at the place of women in the churches with particularly interesting reflections on the differences between North American and British Christian feminists. Her most recent novel, Ancestral Truths, synthesizes all the interests and identities mentioned above: the narrator's disposition to mark time by feast days is complemented by her invocations of Fermat's last theorem and Cantor's proof that there are different sizes of infinity. Her characters discuss Thatcherism, feminism, math, and God. They also pray.

Maitland's joy in both synthesis and contradiction is most evident in the stylistic mix of Ancestral Truths. Imagine Edgar Allen Poe rising out of the grave to possess Henry James. In the Jamesian vein, Maitland presents a psychologically rich portrait of the Kerslake family (seven middle-aged siblings, their assorted spouses and children, presided over by two devoutly Anglican parents) on holiday in the Scottish Highlands. Maitland brilliantly conveys the dynamics of a large family; in particular, the combination of love, exasperation, and jealousy that these adult brothers and sisters feel for one another and their parents.

Maitland shapes her characters with great delicacy. In a short summary they seem like types: Hester, a powerful, pious matriarch; Tom, hail-fellow-well-met; Ben, a gay Anglican cleric just caught in a public sex scandal; Felicity, a furious mother of a deaf child; Anni, a purist vegan and dedicated intellectual. But Maitland makes them all convincing, keeping them from falling into set roles and preserving their distinctiveness, despite a family likeness in education, piety, and political commitment.

Althoogh much of the novel comprises finely wrought portraits of family life and family members, its main energy is gothic. The novel is presided over by "The Hand" and tells the sensational story of cousin Clare who, as a young girl, was adopted into the Kerslake family after her parents blew themselves up in a pyrotechnic experiment. Enter Poe. Clare is recovering from a disastrous vacation in Zimbabwe, where, on Mount Nyangani, she may or may not have murdered her longtime lover David, whom she did not love. All she and we know is that the rescue party found her with an irreparably tom right hand, babbling that she had killed him. Other explanations for his death are possible: Clare and David broke every hiking rule, the mountain is haunted by ancient powerful spirits, and it is filled with RENAMO thugs attempting to destabilize Zimbabwe. But Clare cannot remember what happened. Her hand is amputated, her lover dead, her career as a professional photographer over, her memory damaged: "a pretty impressive list of losses even for her."

Back in England she gets a state-of-the-art artificial hand and a very worried family. "The Hand," as it is called, has a will of its own: striking her adopted mother when Clare thinks she wants to caress her, seizing and breaking objects when she wants to appear calm. The family gather round during their holiday and try to prompt her memory for a variety of reasons: to help her recover, to bring the episode to a resolution, to convince themselves they aren't related to a murderer, and to satisfy morbid curiosity. She has rather difficult needs, namely to discover why she stayed with David for so many loveless years, and why she is afraid to act on genuine desire.

When "The Hand" made its appearance on page nine, I dreaded the moment when one of the characters would say, "If your right hand offends you, cut if off." I knew that my heart would sink when it happened, which it did, on page 248. Ceci, the sibling who has become a Roman Catholic nun, utters it in a passionate yet dramatically unconvincing speech that "God is the only danger big enough." By this time, Maitland is using the Kerslake propensity for didactic talk to explicate her intentions. In the book's shaky penultimate scenes, Maitland does not trust that the religious symbolism will resonate without her intervention. So we learn exactly what it means when Clare takes off and abandons "The Hand." We learn precisely that the events on Mount Nyangani are connected to the mysterium tremendum.

What we do not learn is whether Clare killed David or not. Maitland's refusal to end the story with a resolution of its apparently central mystery saves the book. Suddenly the real mystery of the book takes its rightful place: the terrifyingly insistent love and unconditional forgiveness offered by God, and embodied in the all-too-human family. Ancestral Truths is a wonderfully written and intelligent religious novel. After you read it, you may also hope that Henry James will rise up out of his grave and urge Maitland to follow his path of showing rather than telling.