Mortal Combat on the Roof of Africa : TO ASMARA <i> by Thomas Keneally; (Warner Books: $18.95; 290 pp.)</i>

Ethiopia, the so-called “Roof of Africa,” always has fascinated outsiders--for its studied remoteness, its harsh geology and the hardiness of its people in the face of terrible adversity. Edward Gibbon wrote: “The Aethiopians slept near a thousand years, forgetful of the world, by whom they were forgotten.” The British historian was trying to explain how, separated by geography and history, the Ethiopians were able to pass through an entire millennium out of touch with Europe and the currents sweeping the rest of the world. As recently as 40 years ago, John Gunther described the country as “a mountain fastness, a fortress, cut off to a large extent from the adjacent world by the mere fact of its altitude, an impregnable feudal kingdom lost in space.”

Then, in 1889, the Italians tried to conquer Ethiopia. Though they were defeated by Emperor Menelik II in the Battle of Adowa, rather than drive the Italians back into the Red Sea, Menelik allowed them to colonize the northernmost province of the country, a fertile, rocky, mountainous land known as Eritrea. This then sowed the seeds for a bitter, long-running civil war that carries on through today--a war which has taken almost as many lives and cost the great powers almost as much in armaments as the Northern Ireland conflict or the battle over Afghanistan.

For a time, after a British-led commando force returned Emperor Haile Selassie to the Ethiopian throne in 1941 and drove Mussolini’s legions out of the country, Eritrea was governed as a kind of semi-autonomous dominion, first under British and then American control. The United Nations briefly considered a proposal to partition the territory, giving its Muslim half to neighboring Sudan and its Christian half to the Emperor, but in the end the Emperor took it all--allowing the Americans to establish military bases and a high-tech listening post on its 7,700-foot-high plateau to eavesdrop on the critical Middle East battleground to the north.

The American military presence in Eritrea, in turn, caused the Arabs to support the territory’s two dissident movements, the Eritrean Liberation Front (ELF) and its more radical offshoot, the Eritrean People’s Liberation Front (EPLF). Finally, in 1974, when the Emperor was deposed by a Russian-aligned cabal of Ethiopian army officers (led by Maj. Mengistu Haile Mariam), the Americans were driven out of Eritrea, the Arabs lost interest in the conflict and the Ethiopian army was permitted to commit a form of genocide against the Eritreans, laying waste the province’s beautiful

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Continued From Second Page Italianate capital of Asmara and massacring its people--even going into the churches to gun down Coptic Christian refugees.

But despite the fierceness of the Russian-military assisted pogrom against the Eritreans--and the relative indifference of the international community to events of the last decade--the Eritrean resistence movement has been able to survive. Settling into caves and well-hidden mountain camps, the ELF and EPLF now have joined forces and, armed largely with stolen Russian weapons, waged a fierce guerrilla war--controlling most of the countryside and even mounting raids against Ethiopian military encampments inside Asmara.

This is the struggle that captivated Australian novelist Thomas Keneally, whose dozen or so novels have covered events as diverse as the American Civil War and the problems of the Aborigines in the Australian outback. Keneally, who turned 54 on Oct. 7, risked his life to travel into the war zone, crossing into Eritrea from an EPLF sanctuary in the Sudan in order to gather material for this incredibly detailed portrayal of life in a dusty, little-reported African guerrilla war. For a protagonist, Keneally chose an Australian free lance, Darcy, supposedly on loose assignment from the Times of London. Darcy is contacted by the EPLF in London, attracted by his earlier reports on another civil war between Africans and Arabs in southern Sudan.

Darcy is able to persuade the Times to send him as far as Port Sudan, where the EPLF puts him in a group with a cynical American aid worker, Mark Henry; a French waif, Christine Malmedy, seeking her long-estranged photographer father, and the titled widow of a British district commissioner, Lady Julia Ashmore-Smith, who returns to Africa--either out of boredom with Europe or to perform some ameliorating function by writing about the war, or a little of both.

The group then is taken through EPLS-held Eritrea to “the front,” where Christine is reunited with her jaunty, mercenary-like father and Henry is unmasked as an agent for the Ethiopians (who have pressured him into identifying guerrilla bases in exchange for the possible release of his Somali girlfriend back in Addis Ababa).

Darcy watches these people and events and is carried along in the group as a sort of accidental tourist. The closest he comes to showing any passion or even pain at the deprivation the group suffers is when he complains about the the guerrilla army’s failure to introduce him to an Ethiopian prisoner of war he is seeking.

He has strange longings for a beautiful, if crippled, Eritrean woman, Amna, who has some vague function in the guerrillas’ underground, and their attraction simmers through much of the journey--with flashbacks to the time when Darcy’s Chinese-blooded wife abandoned him for a violent Aboriginal ex-convict (car theft, burglary). All of this is told with a diary-like quality, as if the mere chronicling of life in an African guerrilla war zone were enough to sustain interest.

The book ends with the Ethiopian prisoner of war Darcy is seeking uncharacteristically committing treason against his fellow officers by leading an Eritrean raid on an Ethiopian air base in Asmara, and with Darcy being killed in a strange blast that destroys a truck of relief supplies Amna is trying to save.

But to say the book ends is to say too much. It just sort of runs out, the way any drama might after most of the characters have left the stage. The problem with the book--and it is a peculiar one for someone as skilled as Keneally (whose 1982 book “Schindler’s List” won the Booker Prize and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for fiction)--is that the motivation of the characters, with the possible exception of Mark Henry and Christine Malmedy, is only vaguely understood. The protagonist appears as lost at the end as he was at the beginning. He dies on a whim, trying to get close to a woman he barely knows.

The other members of the guerrilla troupe we meet--Moka, the group’s diminutive guide; guerrilla leader Col. Tessfaha; Maj. Fida, the prisoner of war--are only superficially sketched.

And the book suffers from not being a very good yarn. Ernest Hemingway in “For Whom the Bell Tolls” sought to indoctrinate the world about a distant civil war. He was as much a partisan of the dissidents as Keneally clearly is--beginning with his dedication of the book to “the compassionate Eritrean Relief Assn. and the brave Eritrean People’s Liberation Front”--but Hemingway was able to distance himself from the nobility of their cause--fighting tyranny-- by outlining the pathetic side of his protagonist Jake Barnes and the other characters who attached themselves to the Spanish struggle. Hemingway understood that noble causes are not always led by noble men, and even the ordinary men who lead them achieve their nobility only in brief moments of courage and grace. This is not the case in “To Asmara.” The vicious, often tyrannical side of the “good guys” in this war is never admitted.

Having myself walked as a journalist with a guerrilla army through Portuguese-held Mozambique and later having spent time inside and outside Ethiopia with members of the Eritrean Liberation Front in the early ‘70s, I know firsthand how elusive these characters can be, and the difficulties in getting them to talk. But a novelist has liberties a journalist can’t muster. A novelist can plug up the holes. Moreover, it is up to the novelist to reveal character through time and action.

Poor Darcy swats at African yellow jackets and hides from swarms of locusts without learning much about his companions or his hosts, other than that they eat a lot of injera , the pounded bread that unites Ethiopians of all tongues, and that they like to drink fermented sewa at day’s end to try to ease the pain of a 40-year-old war.

This is a peculiarly frustrating book because Keneally is such a good writer. No one can describe the Godforsaken land where the Eritreans care for their wounded and prepare for battle more accurately. His writing often has a John McPhee-like precision, as in the scenes where rebel doctors try to treat the wounded and half-starved peasants under incredibly primitive conditions.

Much of the problem seems to come from Keneally’s allegiance to the cause. He makes Darcy--in the words of Henry--”a smug bastard. A hard man to share a dessert with.” Or 300 pages. Darcy already has been rejected by his wife for his lack of commitment. That might be considered an occupational hazard for a journalist who has to remain objective as he watches partisans play out the drama. But Darcy is like no journalist I have ever met. He has no deadlines, takes virtually no notes, never strains to learn what happened in a battle or what is going on in the larger context of the war. If this book, which theoretically is some kind of found diary, were ever presented posthumously to his editors at the Times, they would have their work cut out for them trying to make it into a publishable memorial.

Instead, Keneally’s most fascinating character is Henry, who at least has the good sense now and then to curse the dreariness of the journey, the lack of information the travelers are given and the diarrhea they all suffer from. (Alas, Henry turns out to be a scoundrel, who drops tiny transmitters on villages and outposts to signal Ethiopian MiG pilots where to drop their bombs.)

Coleridge also was captivated by tales of Ethiopia, or Abyssinia as it used to be known: “A damsel with a dulcimer/ In a vision once I saw:/ It was an Abyssinian maid,/ And on her dulcimer she play’d . . . “ Somehow Keneally, the novelist, got seduced by the Eritrean dulcimer. That’s not surprising, because theirs undoubtedly is a noble cause. The Italians taught them European technology and values, and then abandoned them to the feudalism of post-war Ethiopia. Emperor Haile Selassie dragged their teachers and highly skilled mechanics off to the factories and universities of Addis Ababa and recolonized the territory as a tribal fief. Haile Mengistu has shown himself to be worse--massacring innocent peasants in his frustration at being unable to quell a guerrilla rebellion.

Meanwhile, the West has turned a deaf ear to the struggle because it provides no benefits to the benefactors of the victor. Should the EPLF/ELF prevail, they hardly can be expected to embrace the Americans and British again--or welcome back the Italians. That explains Washington’s indifference to the war, but it doesn’t totally explain why the Eritreans haven’t been able to evince more world interest or sympathy. Some of that is due to the occasional brutality of the rebels themselves--hinted at when Keneally refers to how EPLF soldiers are accustomed to blowing up aid trucks rather than let the enemy provide assistance to their people.

Anyway, the nobility of the rebels shouldn’t be the concern of the novelist. His job is to sketch an intriguing story against an exotic backdrop. Keneally forgot to leave his commitment to the cause behind in Port Sudan, and, as a result, may limit the audience for this interesting glimpse of one of the world’s saddest wars.