BARBARA & ALEX & ANDREW.

A Stairway to Paradise

Madeleine St. John

Carroll & Graf Publishers, $22, 185 pp.

It is a pleasure to return from the trenches of book reviewing with a real find in hand. Indeed, I so enjoyed this slip of a novel that immediately upon finishing it I got hold of Madeleine St. John's earlier work, The Essence of the Thing (which was nominated for the Booker Prize), and read it straight through, too.

A Stairway to Paradise begins, appropriately, with Barbara, "big, velvety Barbara," elusive Barbara, alluring Barbara, inspirer of love (or lust) in two middle-aged men. Ambling through her life with no defined plan, she appears to be one of those "nineties dropouts" who inhabit various corners of the British Isles. She drifts into the life of Alex MacLise, a Fleet Street journalist, through her acquaintance with his wife, Claire. Although she initially regards the attractive, dour Alex as a Mr. Rochester type (and in a distracted moment actually asks the housekeeper to iron "Mr. Rochester's" shirts), it is only a matter of days before they find themselves passionately in love. They also find themselves on the horns of a dilemma: Alex feels morally bound to stay in his bloodless marriage until his younger child is old enough to attend boarding school, and Barbara is unwilling to enter into a hidden and adulterous relationship. Anguished but resolute, they part.

Enter Andrew Flynn, a charming and somewhat bumbling academic who has just returned to London after a ten-year sojourn in the United States. His life has taken an unexpected turn: The dream teaching job that has brought him back to London has also cost him his marriage and the company of his beloved young daughter. Meeting Barbara at a party, unaware of her history with his old friend Alex, he immediately falls for her.

Thus the essential geometry of the novel: Alex and Barbara and Andrew in triangle, with tangents out to Alex's wife, Claire, and Andrew's daughter, Mimi, and a phalanx of other very British characters. The interplay of confession and discretion, desire and scruple among these various characters is the essence of the novel. St. John moves along briskly, sometimes skipping a year between chapters, sometimes mere seconds. With her taut writing, she never once fails to convey the emotional intensity of her characters' lives.

Indeed, while the plot is carefully structured and the novel's forty- nine chapters nicely organized into four parts, the writing is so good that it almost doesn't matter what happens. St. John's prose is spare but rich, like a desert flower in bloom. Not a word is wasted. She is a frequent elider, accurately replicating the spoken shorthand that passes for conversation in Britain. Here are Andrew and Alex, sharing a pint after a squash game. Andrew says,

"Mimi comes here quite soon. Summer hols. My turn to parent."

"Ah."

"Strange old world, isn't it?"

"Crazy."

"Yeah. Have another?"

"No thanks, mate. I'm due at the chez about now."

"Right you are. Shall we?"

St. John manages brilliantly to create a narrative voice that is detached, yet directly in touch with vulnerability and pain. "They were both in pretty desperate need of laughter at this juncture, were these two," she writes of Alex and Andrew early in the novel, just after an awkward car ride with Barbara which constitutes the novel's memorable opening scene. Despite the ironic tone, the reader pities these blokes as they grope about in their unspoken suffering. On another occasion, as Alex considers the spaciousness of his north London house, St. John conveys briefly, in architectural terms, the hollowness of his marriage: "The skirting-it made up for a lot, an awful lot, that skirting. It made up for vacancy, and ironical courtesy, and alienation, almost."

A Stairway to Paradise, despite the fact that its protagonists are putatively engaged in an extramarital affair, is a deeply moral novel. It is, ultimately, about human beings searching for God in a puzzling, unpredictable world. Barbara is the novel's most apparent drifter, but in fact Andrew and Alex are both caught in life situations that they could not have imagined or desired. Perhaps what St. John is after is the idea that all of us are drifters, carried along through our lives by a current whose direction and speed we are completely unable to control. The novel's premise is that life is, in Alex's words, "an irredeemably irrational construct." Or, as Andrew says, "We're all just stumbling around in the dark. We can't possibly know what we're doing...it's the way we're designed, basically. Not our fault."

The moral question Barbara, Alex, and Andrew all face is how to find meaning in their human helplessness in the face of life's caprices. Alex and Barbara struggle to sort out their love for each other, which is "all wrong, but...the only right, the only possible, thing in all the universe." Barbara argues for moral action as the only choice, though quite possibly a futile one: "'All there is in the end,' she said, 'is-is-simply-trying to keep one's hands clean-and it's difficult.'" Alex counters with a moral doctrine of relatedness, whatever the cost: The best thing we can hope for in life is to connect, really connect, to another soul, he says. He urges Barbara not to reject the possibility of such a heavenly union "for the sake of a mere scruple."

Barbara nails him here. The connection cannot be real, she declares, as long as the scruple exists. All choices in a moral universe are related. To the conundrum of human existence-the longing for love hindered by fate, or compromised by our sinful nature-there is one saving grace, even if it can be summoned only by default. "God may deliver us," Barbara says to Alex, adding, "There's no one else who can help us here."

Much later, in Australia, homesick and still despairingly in love with Alex, Barbara remarks to a friend on the casual use of the phrase, "Oh, God." As she turns it over and over on her lips, it becomes a cry from the heart-a prayer. And in the moment that she utters that prayer, she believes that she finds God. For Barbara, metaphor becomes reality, just as in her relationship with Alex the phrase "with my body I thee worship" was transformed from a dry phrase written by a Tudor clergyman to the ultimate expression of love and connection between two people. The word, indeed, becomes flesh.

There are no tidy endings here. The stairway to paradise does not incline straight up, but dips and shifts, making crazy and unpredicted turns. It reminds this reader of the story of Jacob's ladder. Awaking from a sleep during which he has seen the angels of God ascending and descending on a ladder, and has received God's blessing and promise, Jacob said, "Surely the Lord is in this place and I knew it not." In this deftly-written and delightful novel, God lurks just out of sight.

Elizabeth Kirkland Cahill is co-author with Joseph Papp of Shakespeare Alive!