FALLING OUT OF TIME by O.R. Melling <i> (Viking: $18.95; 256 pp.) </i>

Multi-levels of reality, numbered fragments of text, intermixing of illusion and fact and characters jumping in and out of their fictional worlds are all part of O.R. Melling’s agenda of postmodernist writing. The author’s gift is in granting ordinary events extraordinary causes, cloaking them with the potent poetic license of mysticism. The book runs charmingly true to course, but for one liberty, justified by the modern setting: Her characters’ drug use makes the fantastic elements palatable--indeed, who would not believe in the manipulations of gods and influence of faeries in a feverish opium dream?

Two gods meet and declare a new cycle of love: “Two rooms that are one. . . . Two beds that are a single note of multiplicity.” Michael, a musician, and Raffie, a philosophy student, are Dublin lovers. The outcome is foretold--that love is transient and passion will always exhaust itself in strife and separation. Actually, their story is merely the manuscript of a writer at an artists’ retreat in Ireland, hoping to mythologize her failed marriage on the page and thereby gain release from it. But as storytellers have always maintained, characters have a way of walking off with their own conclusions. The confrontation between the narrator and Raffie over the ending of this and all love affairs is the fluid, final unweaving of the fictional lie.

Melling’s first adult work (her last work, “The Singing Stone,” is a children’s book) is a brave melding of insight and madness. It is easy to judge this as an immature work, yet it is a supple one that starts in and out of convention with fey grace and more than a few sassy tricks.