Wild Child Turns Tedious in Sydney : ANCESTORS <i> by Robyn Davidson (Simon & Schuster: $19.95; 266 pp.; 0-671-68062-5) </i>

In late July, when “Ancestors” was released in Australia, the tabloids and television talk shows went into high gear. Robyn Davidson has been a staple of celebrity gossip Down Under since her highly publicized 1,700-mile trek across the outback with a team of camels (recorded in a finely written nonfiction book, “Tracks”) and her equally publicized, lengthy and tempestuous relationship with Salman Rushdie. In July, the buzz from Sydney parties and gossip columnists was that the Camel Lady had written a thinly disguised autobiographical roman a clef about the Grand Passion.

Interviewers had two questions: How close is Zac Appelfeld to Salman Rushdie? And what do you think of the portrait of yourself as explorer Alleluia Cone in “The Satanic Verses”? Davidson handled these questions with dignity and intelligence, pointing out that the links between life and the novel were the private business of the writer. She asked, quite properly, that her work be judged on its own terms.

By those terms, the first 60 pages of “Ancestors” form a fine novella of a childhood in the rain forest of North Queensland. The rest of the book is a very bad novel of the kind one might expect to see excerpted in Cosmopolitan, absorbing reading only if your taste runs to the Jackie Collins kind of sensationalism and fervid sexual cliche. Lovers always are “quivering with emotion” or swallowing each other’s souls or speaking with voices “smooth as warmed honey” or engaging in the following sort of steamy banality: “Each night with him took me deeper into a syrupy, enervating swamp from which I would struggle to rise at daybreak, only to sink back into sensual ooze.”

Lucy McTavish is orphaned at age 7 and consigned to the care of a dotty maiden aunt in North Queensland. In the rain forest, Lucy leads the life of a wild child, fiercely independent, precociously intelligent, bored with the one-teacher school, drawn into intellectual kinship and sexual experimentation with Wally Gajic, crazy Wally, despised son of a drunkenly violent immigrant father. This is the good part of the book. Davidson re-creates powerfully the Dickensian aura of country schooling in Queensland. She evokes the hedonism, the self-reliance, the sense of awe and the taste for adventure that rain-forest childhoods breed.

It is when Lucy is sent off to boarding school in Brisbane that the writing plummets into banality and self-indulgence. It is as though Davidson needs desert or jungle to give her writing sinew. Her protagonists (the explorer-self in “Tracks,” Lucy in “Ancestors”) are complex in solitary relationship with the environment, tacky with other people.

Lucy’s picaresque adventures accumulate: boarding-school rebellion, flight to Sydney, communal counterculture living, hazy left-wing politics, much casual sex, long stint as gangster’s mistress, impassioned training in secret as a tightrope walker (“I saw myself a hundred feet in the air, spotlights following me as I serenely sailed through space, risking death in order to give my life meaning, borne aloft on the adoration of an infinite audience.”

Sudden success in the circus, fame, world touring, fateful meeting with Zac at Sydney party, grand passion, betrayal, madness, flight back to rain forest, long therapy sessions with the ghosts of ancestors (these are interspersed throughout the novel, all of which is told in flashback), peace finally achieved in sentimental and laughably improbable reunion with Wally Gajic. (Davidson would have done well to check the libraries and bookstores of small North Queensland towns recently, before she had Wally, the rain-forest recluse, steal their copies of Foucault, Kierkegaard, and Spinoza).

Throughout this latter section of the book, characters are cardboard cutouts. Lucy tells us with tedious frequency that others find her beautiful, irresistible and complex, but as a character in the novel, she is one-dimensional and tiresomely self-obsessed.

Of course, the literary reader cannot resist returning to “The Satanic Verses,” and there are many striking instances of intertextuality, most notably the scene where the male lover defaces (in ominous ways) publicity posters of the famous explorer/circus performers. The literary truth strikes harshly when the novels are read in tandem: Alleluia Cone is a scintillating and intelligent woman; Lucy McTavish (except in early childhood) is not. One wants to urge Davidson: Return to your true grand passion, the solo affair with Nature. There, as a writer, you excel.