BOOK REVIEW : TO ALL APPEARANCES A LADY<i> by Marilyn Bowering</i> Viking $18.95, 336 pages : What’s Going on Here? Far Too Much to Comprehend, It Seems

In cooking, some recipes make daring, audacious attempts, but in the end, the mix of ingredients is bound to defeat the enterprise. Consider, for instance, capirotada , a regional dish of the Sonoran Desert, which combines tortillas, French bread, peanuts, onions, cinnamon, brown sugar, tomatoes and I don’t know what all. You have fun making it, but the trouble comes in eating it.

The literary antecedents of this particular novel, like the wildly disparate ingredients of capirotada , include Rod Jones’ “Julia Paradise,” Marianne Wiggins’ “John Dollar,” Tim Winton’s “Shallows” and Charles Dickens’ “A Christmas Carol.” Put more specifically, that would mean an emphasis on the raping of Chinese girls by beefy British Empire types; a lady’s romance with a creature of the deep, an evocation of the evils of 19th-Century whaling, and a very long conversation with a ghost. There’s lots of wonderful stuff here, but I’m not sure it all belongs in the same novel.

“To All Appearances a Lady” begins in the middle of the 20th Century in Vancouver, British Columbia. (Whether it’s the island at this point or the mainland, it’s hard to say. You can read lines 17 and 18 on Page 11 a dozen times and still never be quite sure.) Robert Lam, a Eurasian bachelor, aged 57, is waiting for his hundred-year-old Chinese stepmother to die, which she does in short order. Then Robert gets on a boat he’s just bought and decides to steer north, through the inland strait between Vancouver Island and the Canadian mainland. Here, he’s joined by the ghost of his stepmother, who has finally decided to tell him about his mysterious past.

So far, so good! The story of the emigration of courageous Chinese in the mid-19th Century to the inhospitable shores of this deceptively prosperous new world is a terrific one, with infinite permutations. Robert Lam’s mother-to-be, India Thackery, was English, from Hong Kong. She had an adopted Chinese sister, Lam Fan (the stepmother in question, and an opium addict). When the two sisters sail to British Columbia on a famous clipper ship, the Thermopylae, they encounter prejudice; Lam Fan, for instance, has to pay a head tax even to come onshore.

There’s no way this plot can be summarized. It would take every inch in this section. It can be said that a California loser named Robert Haack bumbles into the action and falls in love with India. Both sisters work at a restaurant and at an opium factory (legal in Vancouver at that time). Meanwhile, at every inlet on the island, the whaling industry is progressing with every possible level of gore. The indigenous native population is retreating into a land of strange folk tales. Ten-year-old Chinese girls have become a growth industry as these luckless children are imported by the boatload to slake the lusts of Caucasian adventurers. And if all this weren’t enough, out on D’Arcy Island, visible from Vancouver Island, a band of Chinese lepers is rotting and dying.

The trouble is, with all this laudable research and history, the characters don’t have room to breathe. Each tide, each eddy, each snag around the treacherous edges of Vancouver Island is recorded in excruciating detail. Robert Lam and his dead stepmother bicker incessantly. Whole chunks of undigested history--about how opium is processed, where and how it’s exported and imported--just lie there on the page. When India, by sorrowful chance, is landed on D’Arcy Island to spend seven years with Chinese lepers, we don’t get to know much about the lepers as people . They just get tired.

When the question of rape comes up--and there are parallel rapes in this book--Robert Lam confesses to the ghost of his stepmother that when he raped someone he thought he was going blind at the time. But his symptoms mysteriously abate after the rape. Why? Later, Lam turns up with other symptoms that sound a lot like leprosy. Why?

You can read this novel as a parable of the evils of empire, a eulogy for a lot of unjustly slaughtered whales; you can consider the question of rape as politics. You can meditate on drug traffic, then and now. You can substitute AIDS for leprosy. You can do everything, as a reader, except care what happens to India Thackery and Lam Fan and Robert Lam. You can’t get around to them, because there’s too much other stuff in this novel.

Next: Bettyann Kevles reviews Morton Hunt’s “The Compassionate Beast: What Science Is Discovering About the Human Side of Humanity” and Alfie Kohn’s “The Brighter Side of Human Nature: Altruism and Empathy in Everyday Life . “