The Metaphor of the Monkeys : BRAZZAVILLE BEACH <i> By William Boyd (William Morrow</i> :<i> $21; 316 pp.) </i>

Hope Clearwater--young, single, with “all manner of impressive academic qualifications” and family back home in England--is living on Brazzaville Beach--”washed up, you might say”--in a West African nation freshly crucified on the cross of its civil wars. “Sometimes I ask myself what am I doing here?” confesses Hope, who will reveal her own story in an utterly convincing, though joyless and rarely sympathetic, voice. “How can I explain it to you?”

In a nutshell, here’s what’s happened to Hope. No. 1 disaster, the better-written and more authoritative of the two, is her marriage to John Clearwater, a 35-year-old mathematician who believes that time’s running out on his chance for professional glory. Enamored of the connotation of his name, Hope claims her husband before she ever meets him and allows her own career as an ecologist to lapse in the name of marital tranquility. But she rebels at her mate’s erratic behavior and exclusive immersion in his work--four years of Game Theory forgotten for his new passion, the dynamic properties of turbulence. John and Hope separate.

To thwart “awful self-pity,” Hope exchanges highbrow England for war-torn Africa, joining a celebrated primate-studies outpost, the Grosso Arvore Research Project, whose international funding has dwindled in proportion to the intensity of the internecine fighting within the project’s host nation. Coincidentally, there’s been an inexplicable division in the project’s “family” of chimpanzees.

Hope is assigned to investigate the southern, breakaway faction, only to discover that the chimps are engaged in their own ugly little civil war. Her colleagues ignore, dismiss, or actively conspire to suppress the evidence. At stake is the credibility (and marketability) of the project’s founder and director, Eugene Mallabar, a Jane Goodall-ish wild-kingdom guru and author of “The Peaceful Primate.”

Hope has the analytical, questioning mind of a scientist, adorned with metaphysical pretensions, but she’s also a bit blind-hearted and ice-cold, the sort of person who will form an aesthetic appreciation of the world without ever making sensual contact, and her evaluative skills prove ultimately ineffectual in helping her to understand what she’s been through.

What Hope Clearwater can do quite successfully is report her observations, launching into an elaborate aria interposed with erudite variations on the thematic melodies of the narrative--mathematical axioms that suggest a correlation with human behavior, evolutionary conundrums and genetic ironies, the ambitions of nature and the nature of ambition, randomness and turbulence in both the physical world and the human spirit.

Fragmented and convoluted, Hope’s telling is nevertheless wholly accessible--the author’s structural wizardry is breathtaking as he alternates the two stories, bringing them to simultaneous crisis. Yet as much as she is able to articulate the acts and abstractions of her life, Hope is incapable of interpreting and integrating the information, and meaning is deferred to the reader.

The events that Hope Clearwater reconstructs in her level, intellectually sound manner often are sensational, at times even absurd, yet I suppose British author William Boyd’s sterling reputation as a raconteur is not likely to be undermined by “Brazzaville Beach,” his fifth novel, which arrives in the States having already conquered the best-seller lists in England.

Boyd, an orthodox stylist though a daring craftsman, a writer who allows the scope of his work to expand to the point of bursting, employs well-groomed language and intrepid plotting; he’s obsessed with exploring the pathology of genius and madness, committed to no-nonsense probes of the imperial age and its post-colonial aftermath. “A Good Man in Africa” and “An Ice-Cream War” earned him commercial clout, a literate and enthusiastic following, and acclaim as a master storyteller. His narratives are rich in action and thought; they accelerate like sharks circling something bleeding in the water. And they bite--hard, intractable and unforgiving.

Nevertheless, there are critical moments in “Brazzaville Beach” when the thrills are gratuitous and without subtlety, or preciously Gothic. The 39-year-old author, who was born and reared in Africa and now lives in London, risks becoming a victim of his own work habits. “I’ve figured out the whole book before I start,” Boyd recently told an interviewer.

More’s the pity, since “Brazzaville Beach” is clearly a novel in which the writer knows his itinerary far too well. The atmosphere seems circumscribed, reeking with inevitability. Neither the author nor the reader are in for many surprises on this brisk, complex, yet over-mapped tour through Hope Clearwater’s tumultuous life, interrupted by meditative rest stops that up the thematic ante without diminishing the overall impression of convenience.

Boyd introduces us to a nation and a narrator convalescing from post-traumatic shock, tending their wounds but poised for healing, anticipating a resurrection that might never come, or never adequately replace what was lost. The dire events that shape the book (and have left Hope’s life shapeless) have run their course, and now beg reflection. The Socratic caveat--”The unexamined life is not worth living”--both opens and closes the novel like the crash of a gong, and Hope is obligated to make sense out of a pair of numbing catastrophes before she can “restart my life in the world.”

Hope finally confronts Mallabar with irrefutable evidence that his theories about peaceful chimpanzee society are wrong: In calculated fashion, during highly disciplined guerrilla raids, his northern chimps are brutally murdering her southern band. In a paroxysm of rage, Mallabar accuses Hope of corrupting his darlings, then tries to beat her to death.

Monkey see, monkey do. The irony is anything but provocative.

I take the ambitious scope of Boyd’s intentions seriously, and applaud his ever-enlarging frame, unfolding from the domestic into the geopolitical, but I have no taste for the story’s final destination.

Hope flees the project, to be abducted by one of the three rebel factions vying for power in the countryside. She develops a bittersweet fondness for her kidnapers--a teen-age volleyball team transformed by history into revolutionaries--only to witness the last of them die during her rescue by government mercenaries. Returned to the project, she learns that her native field assistant Joao has been fired; Mallabar has suffered a nervous breakdown; the publication of his book has been postponed, and Hope’s termination papers have been prepared for her signature.

Taking her leave, she seeks out Joao in his village for a primate update: All the southern chimps are dead, or reassimilated into the northern group, except a male nicknamed Conrad, whom Joao hasn’t seen for a week. “I suddenly knew exactly what I wanted to do,” Hope tells us, and treks off up the jungled slopes.

Without inordinate effort, she tracks down a starving, battered Conrad right in time to observe the final assault of the guerrilla chimps on the lone southern survivor. The only surprise here is the author’s self-serious contrivance, and the dumbfounding imperialistic symbolism of the climax. “I knew my conscience would never be troubled,” Hope asserts, “because I had done the right thing, for once. The chimpanzee wars were over.”

All along, Boyd has taken pains to draw parallels between primates and humans, but the metaphorical universe that bonds the two narratives of the novel together seems incongruous with this baffling, politically suspect conclusion.

Presumably, Hope Clearwater has justified her life by reviewing its tribulations, but what are we to make of her merciless intervention in the natural order, her tidying up of fraternal aggressions and rivalries, ridding the world of “bad” monkeys? In “Brazzaville Beach,” it seems Mother (England) knows best.