Of Justice and a Good Night’s Sleep : KILLING MISTER WATSON <i> by Peter Matthiessen (Random House: $21.95; 346 pp.) </i>

When I finished reading Peter Matthiessen’s last novel, “Far Tortuga,” 15 years ago, I felt the need to re-read “Moby Dick.” This was not because “Far Tortuga,” like “Moby Dick,” is a seafaring moral-and-philosophical epic about survival and the myth of heroism, confined, as such tales have to be, to an all-male cast of seafaring characters; but because, like “Moby Dick,” “Far Tortuga” was a novel so singular, so riffy in its many strains of individual human blues, so beautiful and original that it stood alone as something unlike anything I’d ever read.

What it had in common with Melville’s classic was its incomparability to other works of fiction. What it had in common with the other novels of its decade--”Executioner’s Song,” “Rabbit Redux,” “Good as Gold,” “The Ghost Writer,” “Gravity’s Rainbow”--was, to borrow a minimalist’s phrase, less than zero.

“Far Tortuga’s” gifts were lasting. On the surface, it’s the tale of the doomed schooner Eden casting for sea turtles in the Cayman Islands and manned by nine doomed men, only one of whom survives the expedition. At Eden’s helm is one Capt. Raib Avers, an anti-Ahab figure in his decrepitude and dereliction, but a leader whose visionary mission takes them, nevertheless, to their destruction.

That is, more or less, the plot. But what took one’s breath away was Matthiessen’s command of rhythm and of language. “I wish I could speak good,” he had one of his sailors say: “De things I feelin . . . .”

It is that particular evocation, what Matthew Arnold called “the amount of felt life,” that is the hallmark and the genius of all of Matthiessen’s books. Whether he is writing fiction or nonfiction, what is at the center of his prose is a richness of experience, a kinesthetic sensitivity to how the world is lived in by all living things, not merely men and women. He evokes The World, its mysteries and histories, and makes it felt.

In the decade-and-a-half since “Far Tortuga,” he has written (to name a few) “The Snow Leopard,” “In the Spirit of Crazy Horse,” “Indian Country” and, most recently, “Men’s Lives”--all of them nonfiction and each one of them contributing to his reputation as a world-class man of conscience, adventurer, peace-maker, conservationist, Zen Buddhist.

Now comes his long-awaited return to fiction, a new novel called “Killing Mister Watson.”

The book opens in the wake of a catastrophe, the great Florida hurricane of 1910, which devastated that part of its western coast known as the Ten Thousand Islands. On the morning of 24 October, 1910, a man is cleaning out dead chickens from the fish fuddle, petrified furred things and driftwood and wreckage that came to lodge beneath his house during the gale. Working at ground level, he can see the feet and legs of his neighbors walking past his house toward the beach as a motor launch approaches. In the motorboat is Mister Watson, a man they’ve known for years. Minutes after Watson comes ashore, they kill him.

Matthiessen describes the scene--the potent symbol of a man tidying the subterranean structure of his house from which he witnesses the return and execution of the object of communal fear--in nine swift pages. Then he spends the next 400 pages taking us inside that act of violence from every point of view. He, the writer, adopts the voice of law. He asks the reader to become the dead man’s, and the killers’, jury.

At the center of this exercise of judgment, this novel-as-a-dead- man’s trial, is an actual event in history.

Even before the Florida press sensationalized his murder, Edgar (“E. J.”) Watson was a legend in the land. It was known that he’d been born 11 November, 1855, but every other fact about his life was open to debate. It was widely believed that he’d killed at least one man before arriving on the Florida coast--and it was broadly rumored that he’d been the man who’d pulled the trigger on the Queen of Outlaws, Maybelle (Belle) Shirley Starr, on her own birthday in February, ’89. He’d had at least three known wives and Lordy knows how many bastards.

His was an outsized life, violent and contemptible, punctuated by the dastardly but characterized by a personal charisma that seemed to charm the pants off everyone--that is, until they killed him. “Watson talked his way into the clear again,” Matthiessen has somebody say about him, “just like he done so many times before. That feller was a borned politician, probably could of got hisself elected president.” Another character remarks, “Seemed like Watson was about all us local people talked about in them days.”

It is through the voices of those “local people” that the novel is narrated. With the exception of the first chapter, which is called “October 24, 1910,” the day Watson is killed, each succeeding chapter takes its name from one or another of the witnesses to Mister Watson’s life and death. There are a dozen different witnesses in all, “speaking” to the reader in a loosely chronological order leading up to the day of the murder, sometimes repeating themselves, more often than not contradicting what someone else has testified to.

No real facts emerge, only Matthiessen’s subtle revelation of the nature of reality. Piece by piece, he constructs a portrait of a murder as if it were a puzzle, and although every interlocking segment holds, the resulting “picture” is, ingeniously, only what Matthiessen intended it to be: a finished puzzle.

It takes daring in a novelist to front-load the mechanism of dramatic tension the way that Matthiessen has done in “Killing Mister Watson.” Simply reading the title tells the reader all. It is an extremely difficult structure to sustain, and unfortunately the book suffers from being somewhat overlong. Watson is, in fact, killed twice--once at the beginning and again 50 pages from the novel’s end. Those final 50 pages seem superfluous. Once the central character is really truly dead, the local people seem not to have a thing to talk about that really interests them.

And mercy do they talk. If for no other reason, “Killing Mister Watson” should be read for the simple beauty of its can’t-confuse-it-with-nothin-else-on-earth Florida cracker’s life and talk. To a person, Matthiessen has entered the minds and souls of his many narrators.

In a preface to the novel, he acknowledges the descendants of those characters in the novel whom he interviewed, three of whom had actual childhood memories of Watson. But it is one thing to interview people living in the modern Florida, and quite another to extrapolate from their childhood memories a completely felt life. Few of us can know what living in the Ten Thousand Islands was like at the beginning of this century, but “Killing Mister Watson” evokes an unforgettable experience of regional Americana.

In a historical sense, this novel stands with the best that our nation has produced as literature. Specificity has always been the hallmark of our better writers. And by that I don’t mean the “new realism” as heralded by Tom Wolfe. What I mean is something more in the vein of what Eudora Welty was alluding to when she was asked what she thought of William Faulkner’s work. She answered that it was like having a mountain in the neighborhood.

If we could draw that kind of map, then somewhere around Los Angeles there is Mount Nathanael West. Elsewhere, we know where, there is Mount Flannery O’Connor; a range called Hemingway. Mount Matthiessen, it seems to me, is that place on the map where men and women go and speak in the specific language of their region about the moral implications of irrevocable, nearly always violent, acts. “It wasn’t justice they was after,” one of the local people in the novel reasons about Watson’s murder: “It wasn’t justice they was after, but a good night’s sleep. . . . Folks just got tired of him, I guess.”

In his own way, Watson was the mountain in the local people’s neighborhood--a volcanic one. But unlike the despicable central character in “Paris Trout,” for example, Matthiessen has meticulously assembled a character who is both likable and lethal. Everyone loves looking at volcanoes from a distance. The Japanese revere Mount Fujiyama--and not in the least because they hope it is reliably “dead.”

As a philosophical study of the duality of human--and all--nature, “Killing Mister Watson” is first-rate. As a political allegory, it is stunning. Throughout the book, the “local people” refer to Watson’s qualities as a born leader, to his presidential-size charisma. Several other minor villains in the book, average desperadoes, are referred to as “bad actors.”

That, and other subtle references to the time we live in, lard the book. Those references, and a whole lot else about the novel, guarantee, in my opinion, its author’s place, and the place of the novel, in our evolving sense of who we are and what we struggle to attain through literature.