The Service of Clouds.

Paul West

One might well expect even the most insouciant first novelist to display some sense of occasion about the opening sentence. What could be more salient, more telling, than the debut of a career whose close remains unknown? How sad the French phrase l'esprit de l'escalier, denoting brilliant utterances tried out on the stairs after the party is over. Confronted by ten first novels, I decided to group first sentences in ascending order of literary merit, my touchstone for the exercise being Samuel Beckett's Murphy, which begins, "The sun shone, having no alternative, on the nothing new."

Begin with "'Wait,' she cried," and "When the war broke out, I joined the RAF." Bald indeed, and so are "What is a man's best age?" and "I've got a good imagination, man, that's the problem." Imagine an entire book of sentences like these four. Or like this: "The style in which my flat is decorated gives everything away about me." And about your novel, too. Can you get more humdrum than "1 parked the ambulance in front of Hell's Kitchen walk-up number 414 and Larry and I pulled the equipment from the back"? If there's a crime called deliberate avoidance of beauty (odi pulchrum), there it is. Number seven omits nothing obvious: "It rains on Cavan, Monaghan; rains on the hills and the lakes and the roads; rains on the houses and the farms and the fences between them. . . . "Of course: the vision of selective rain hasn't arrived. Eight is almost palatable: "The angel appeared on Paradise Hill the night of the fall equinox, light and dark dividing evenly over the world." Redundant, though. The ninth sentence has a bow-legged audacity I rather enjoyed: "Tom grunts like a girl as he hurdles a black-spotted sow. . . . "Bravo to Trace Farrell, whose sprightly novel The Ruins comes from New York University Press.

Delia Falconer's The Service of Clouds, an Australian novel (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, $23), is the one I fancied most. It begins, "The year the Hydro Majestic Hotel failed as a hydropathic institute Harry Kitchings fell in love with the air and stayed." All through, Falconer shows the same sardonic opportunism, the eye that gathers the absurd and the obtusely lyrical into the same bundle, the heady sense that this is a unique prose occasion not to be botched. Indeed, if anything, it is to be written fullblast, almost as if, thanks to some taint in the atmosphere, sentences might never be written again. Falconer comes close to New Zealander Janet Frame, with her orchestrated, almost expressionistic sense of shock. She seems always to be whispering to herself (and to her first-person narrator): imagine a mind that could come to this - achieve so much, sink so low.

Imagine being Eureka Jones, the novel's narrator, a pharmacist's assistant falling in love in 1907 with a man whose bliss is to photograph cloud formations. Slow to start and burn, her affair with Harry Kitchings doesn't last, but she doesn't begin to tell of it until after he's ditched her and she's left with incessant, roiling images of a grandiose nature-poet who, teaching her that clouds are the planet's outriders, took his lead from John Ruskin - "If a general and characteristic name were needed for modern landscape art, none better could be invented than 'the service of clouds.'"

Halfway through the novel, after an evocation of Dame Clara Butt and the Rajah of Puduka eating Potage du Roi to celebrate the English king's birthday (never mind, they're just ornamental tropes like those British stamps of Diana you can't use in the U.S.), you realize that the real subject is Harry the quarry and the controlled hectic voracity with which Eureka monitors his ways. "I noted the faint electric tremor at the corners of his lips, which moved as if the words he spoke were luminous. I thought, If he treads on one of those glass globes buried in the snow it will not break. Instead, light will spring up from his step." Such voluptuous, willful writing reminds us that realists are our true deluded and succeed through a pervasive sense of anticlimax.

The distinctive thing here is that Eureka is just as concerned with their surroundings as with Harry and what she imagines he is thinking. Reporting her take on him becomes more an exercise in brilliant observation than a chronicle of love. Eureka adores her own sensibility, and her love is a product of it - a sap, a yield, a juice. She cares a lot about him, but not necessarily more than about rings of gravy on the tablecloth or the godmother who lifts herself on her chair to pass wind. Indeed, recalling Isaiah Berlin's title The Hedgehog and the Fox, this is a novel about a woman who knows both a million little things and one big one. She is both animals.

Some readers will find Falconer's prose a bit tarted up. Not 1. Hers is a book of magic. Early on we are told of a French painter who loses a tube of azure paint in a waterfall and so stains blue the vales below. Cloud drifts into dough through open windows, making it rise. Harry gets thinner (a joke?) and eventually Eureka says his "hand never pressed quite hard enough." That says it all for him, as Eureka does for her. Delia Falconer has "found" the world and devoured it.

Paul West's most recent novel is Terrestrials; his next will be Life with Swan, in 1999.