ASPECTS OF LOVE <i> by David Garnett (Alfred A. Knopf: $16.95; 182 pp.) </i>

Like figures on a carousel, the characters in “Aspects of Love” pass by again and again, turning in graceful circles, rising and falling in relation to one another but always moving as a group. David Garnett’s novel concerns a love affair that entangles the lives of five people over a period of several decades. Alexis, a young Englishman studying in France, falls in love with a beautiful French actress, Rose. He invites her to spend two weeks with him at his uncle’s villa. Their idyll is ruined, however, by the arrival of the uncle, Sir George, a charming, wealthy and urbane baronet. Satisfied that his nephew is not disgracing himself, Sir George leaves the lovers in peace, but the magic is broken and Rose rejoins her acting company early.

Two years later, an older Alexis, now a soldier, returns to Paris to look for Rose, only to find her living as his uncle’s mistress. Over the following decades, the threesome’s lives remain entwined as their passionate attachment to each other changes, grows, wanes, matures. Rose and Sir George eventually marry; their daughter Jenny in turn falls in love with Alexis. Sir George has a lifelong liaison with an Italian woman, who also turns up again and again, exerting the influence of her passion--and compassion--on the others.

Although many of the plot turns are highly melodramatic--the story rejoins the characters at succeeding crisis points in the complex relationships--the beauty in the novel lies in the faces the lovers show as they move through the stages of their passions. Alexis, a willful young man, shows up as entirely selfish in his early relationship with Rose, but his affection for Jenny is pure and self-aware. Rose, honest and direct, becomes self-deceiving and ungenerous as a mother. The unfailingly kind and reliable Sir George exhibits blind spots and even cruelty as he withdraws into a solitary old age.

Garnett (1892-1981), son of Russian translator Constance Garnett, was connected with the Bloomsbury crowd. That sensibility is evinced in the novel’s cheerful, anti-Victorian confidence in the value of faithfulness to one’s passions and in the characteristically English admiration for French capacity for abandon. First published in 1955, “Aspects of Love” is now the basis for an Andrew Lloyd Weber musical of the same name, which has opened in London.