BOOK REVIEW : ‘Fairies’: A Charming, Enchanting Novel : PHOTOGRAPHING FAIRIES <i> by Steve Szilagyi</i> ; Ballantine; $18, 321 pages

Aglance at this book’s table of contents tells you that first-time novelist Steve Szilagyi has spent a good many hours reading English fiction in the gothic-fantasy tradition.

Among the chapter titles are “How I Vexed a Great Author,” “How I Met a Fierce Dog,” “How I Was Roughly Treated” and “How I Scared Myself.”

The narrator, Charles Castle, is not interested in self-knowledge or in stylish language but in telling his singular story.

The first few pages of “Photographing Fairies” are in keeping with the mood thus set, for there we learn that Castle is scheduled to hang the next day.

He is “troubled by the thought that I leave nothing behind,” but we know Castle does pass on something significant--the hazy, indistinct photographs of fairies that have led to his conviction on the charge of murder.

Yes, “Photographing Fairies” really is about photographing fairies. Or so it seems, at first; in fact the novel is more about obsession, the things people do when an urge becomes so strong it turns their lives upside down.

Castle, a career-minded American portrait photographer in 1920s London, becomes tangled in the fairies’ web when a policeman, Walsmear, barges into his office and produces blotchy photographs of two girls playing in a garden.

Walsmear insists that the blotches are fairies and, largely to disprove him, Castle blows up the photographs--only to find what appears to be a human figure “hidden in the shadowy pattern the way objects are hidden in those illustrations for children; the ones that conceal spoons, frogs and teacups in the hills and foliage of seemingly ordinary landscapes.”

The fairy’s image appears suddenly, says Walsmear aptly, “like a deer out of the woods.”

Castle is surprised to discover that Walsmear at this point is quite happy to forget about the fairy photographs; his interest lies solely (for reasons later revealed) in establishing the existence of fairies, not in exploiting them.

The photographer is more than a little intrigued, however, and decides to consult with Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, a believer in sprites and fairies in real life.

The creator of Sherlock Holmes pooh-poohs Castle’s enlargements, but the American realizes there must be something to them when Conan Doyle produces yet another set of fairy photographs--obviously fake to the photographer’s professional eye--and offers to pay up to 1,000 to suppress Walsmear’s prints.

Castle, whose business is nearing bankruptcy, soon heads into the English countryside, ostensibly as Conan Doyle’s agent in search of the photographs’ owner, but in reality determined to take his own photographs, beat Conan Doyle to the punch and control the fairy picture market.

“Photographing Fairies” labors occasionally during the first 75 pages, partly because the plot is elaborate and partly because Castle’s personality is distractingly dated and takes getting used to.

Once Szilagyi gets his narrator out of London, however, the book takes off, for that’s when Castle is forced to deal with a picturesque crowd far removed from his day-to-day experience: comedic robbers, cagey Gypsies, lustful women, an athletic minister, a resentful widower, the village idiot and Walsmear once again, all with roles to play in the photographer’s fairy quest.

Caught up in the lives of the local folk--especially the minister’s wife, for whom Szilagyi sets up a wonderfully appropriate dalliance--Castle becomes, in the words of the widower, “an opportunist without an opportunity.”

That description isn’t entirely correct, however, for Castle eventually does find what he’s come for (in the chapter entitled, naturally, “How I Met the Fairies”).

The sight fills him with wonder:

“The world had suddenly burst open with potential,” Castle says. “Anything was possible. Maybe anything was permitted. One thing I knew for certain was that everything we knew about science, religion and philosophy would have to be thrown out once the world had acknowledged the existence of the fairies. . . . Were not all things suddenly permeable?”

Castle seems ready, at this point, to abandon the idea of making money from the fairies, but conversion is now beside the point: Castle’s own unwitting actions are about to result in his arrest and death.

Is it the fairies’ doing--by means of the “glamour,” “a kind of trance into which fairies struck mortals to make them do their bidding?”

Szilagyi gives no hint. But there is at least one spell at work in this book, the one that enabled Szilagyi to imagine this quaint, fairy-filled world with total consistency and conviction.

Castle is too limited a narrator to make “Photographing Fairies” great literature, but it is a remarkable novel nonetheless, full of--literally--charm and enchantment.