The 1,001 Australian Nights : CHARADES <i> by Janette Turner Hospital (Bantam Books: $18.95; 304 pp.)</i>

Many Americans will read this wildly imaginative novel as a contemporary version of “1,001 Nights” or as an attempt to reconcile the Angst of our post-Nazi Holocaust, pre-nuclear holocaust era by understanding scientific theories. Indeed, Janette Turner Hospital’s stunning fourth novel is a resurrection of Scherherazade as well as an extrapolation of Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle. It reads even more provocatively as an Australian odyssey of self-determination.

“Charades” opens in a dimly lit office at MIT. Prof. Koenig looks up from his article on theoretical physics to find a young woman reading over his shoulder. The beautiful, irreverent visitor from Oz compliments his writing and introduces herself as the friend of someone he does not remember. Is he dreaming? Is Charade, he wonders, simply a metaphor for his guilt about his former wife?

Thus begin the 366--not 1,001--nights of a mysterious love affair between the quixotic traveler and the spiritually threadbare middle-aged academic. Their pasts intersect in peripheral, yet significant ways. Their relationship emerges in antipodean mirror images. Only by talking obsessively, night after night, can Charade unknot the painful secrets of her parentage. The listening sustains Koenig enough so that he can turn from his safe academic abstractions, begin to confront his own past and imagine a personal future.

Charade speaks with classic Australian self-deprecatory brashness. She inherits an Anglo-Celtic schizophrenia, assuming one set of legacies from the English upper class and another from the Irish convict class. Her loving, earthy mother represents the essence of home: In fact she was born on January 26, Australia Day. Her father is absent, foreign, ephemeral. Her own name is both symbolic--for she does not know what part of herself is real--and homophonous--because in the abbreviated Australian vernacular (mossies, barbies, journos”)-- Scherherazade could well be clipped to Charade. Like many young Australians, she travels widely, casting nets for her identity and discovering, at least, who she is not.

The various British Empire cousins bear more than a touch of parody. Charade’s English relatives are caricatures of pathetic pretention. Canada is portrayed as a respite for the sensible and timid Aunt Kay. The United States is personified by a sympathetic, but clueless mid-life professor who takes himself too seriously. Australia is young, vibrant, a wee bit dazzled by the Northern Hemisphere but ultimately enlightened about the richness of its own culture.

Charade is reared in the Tambourine Rain Forest, near the east coast (barrier reef) of Australia. “. . . my mum would stare and shake her head. Never seen anything like it, she would say. There were always brothers and sisters, older and younger, falling all over one another and me. It was a small and noisy place, a fibro shack with lizards on the walls, and racks and holes that were hung with sacks of spiders’ eggs. But I would wedge myself into a corner, two sides protected, cross-legged on the floor, a book propped open on my knees, and I wouldn’t even deign to acknowledge the company.”

During her erratic, tender affair with Koenig, Charade explains that she is working at odd jobs around the world while searching for her father. Originally, a coincidence draws her together with the physicist. Later, she learns he was born the same year as her father and that his wife bears marked similarities to her mother. The incest metaphor is played out on many levels.

This is not a linear narrative.Reading the novel is rather like scrambling for keys through an untidy desk. You discover a lost letter, a misplaced message, an unfinished task, a whole life to which keys are an incidental distraction. Hospital writes with luminous wit and ripe sensuality about the sublime and the wretched. The most powerful scenes border on taboo:

“When I was six or seven, she says, I found a dead man in the rain forest and I kept him as a pet. He was my secret. I suppose he was a swaggie. . . . And his smell had its hooks into me. . . . Every day I held a handkerchief over my nose and mouth and watched the ants: the way they embroidered him and covered him with soft brown bunting. Birds spoke to him, and perhaps it was their beaks that punctured his purple balloon-skin . . . . And then he began to deflate, at first quickly with little shudders . . . , but after that slowly, silkily, peacefully, like a glove as a hand withdraws. Each day he was thinner and flatter. I liked him better then, because his smell had escaped from him, bubbling away between the ferns. When he was clean and white inside his muddy clothes, when he smelled as sweet and yeasty as moss, I put flowers in his eyes. You can be my father, I told him.”

The novel is also a seductive intellectual exercise in which Charade tries to comprehend her life in the context of Koenig’s scientific explanations about chance and probability. “And I subscribe, generally speaking, to the Copenhagen view,” Koenig says, leaving the lectern of the bedpost and pacing back and forth from dresser to door. “I think Bohr and Heisenberg won that argument over against Einstein; I think it’s past denying. The imprecision of all perception. The observer, by imposing a particular set of questions, also predetermines the answers he will find.”

Charade’s “particular set of questions” is evoked by the very names of her friends and relatives. Father is Nicholas--”St. Nick”--Truman--”true man.” Mother is Bea--”Queen Bee,” whose nature is simply to “be” with her brood of multifathered children in the forest. And the heart of her search is the elusive Verity, in whom lies a strange, important truth.

It is a measure of Hospital’s lush talent that none of this seems contrived. She takes the reader on an exuberant tour of quantum physics, Middle Eastern mythology, the comparative cultural legacies of British imperialism and still leaves you caring about her characters. What happens to Charade and Koenig together and apart is left appropriately open. All you know is that they are both the better for their idiosyncratic affair and temporarily at opposite ends of the Earth.