Far North By Northwest : SAILOR SONG, <i> By Ken Kesey (Viking: $23.50; 526 pp.)</i>

Eighteen years ago, I was Ken Kesey’s interpreter/guide on an expedition to the Great Pyramid. When we weren’t poking around for mysteries in the Egyptian sands, I was hoping he’d tell stories about his Acid Test days in 1965 and 1966. Kesey, though, wanted to discuss Proust and Hemingway and Turgenev.

Big surprise. Of all the people who talked about the Death of the Novel in the ‘60s, he had seemed most in earnest. After all, this was the guy who’d written “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest” and “Sometimes a Great Notion.” It meant something when a genuine major novelist declared he’d given up writing in favor of putting on LSD parties.

But by 1974 Kesey was talking about the novel again. This was heartening; did it mean he was actually going to write a third novel? Then the ‘70s passed, and the ‘80s, and he published nothing but essays, sketches, children’s stories and one chapter of a collaborative novel.

At last we have a novel-sized book, titled “Sailor Song.” You might call it an ecology tract in the form of a sci-fi story set in the future, or a memoir of what it’s like to be a former media figure and youth guru. The further you get into it, the more it might strike you as a short story padded out four or five times its natural length. What it’s not, unfortunately, is a novel to set beside “Cuckoo’s Nest.”

Here’s the story: In a Greenhouse Effect future 30 to 50 years from now, Alaska has the same romantic allure that Hawaii had in the ‘50s. So a film crew comes to a pristine (though squalid) Alaskan fishing village to shoot a faux-Eskimo folk tale which is one of the 21st Century’s most beloved children’s stories.

It comes out that the film company also plans to develop a theme park in the village. The bourgeois pig film/theme park interests firebomb a newspaper that opposes the development, but the novel’s hero, Ike Sallas (a formerly world-famous eco-terrorist who has read the great 19th- and 20th-Century novels and is described as a Greek god with Elvis Presley eyes), is unable to rouse the village masses against them. Then Sallas’ trademark eco-graffiti reappear and somebody releases the film company’s sea lions into the sea.

At this point we expect to see the masses rallying to the the sea lions’ cause and casting out the developers, but nothing so obvious happens. Instead, an apocalyptic storm, which apparently has to do with a mysterious reversal of the earth’s polarity (and smells of nitrous oxide: hmmm), wreaks vast havoc all over the world, in particular driving computers and clocks haywire and bleaching paints that aren’t made from natural ingredients.

The mysterious storm seems to be some analog of the mental shipwreck of a psychedelic high. (The title “Sailor Song” comes from “Suzanne,” the Leonard Cohen ‘60s anthem in which Jesus says all men will be sailors “until the sea shall free them.”) During the storm, a Russian Orthodox priest has an ecstatic revelation that it means the end of the need for meaning; meaning is nothing, clarity (he has a blinding vision of the jack of spades and the ace of hearts) is all.

How delightful for the people in the novel, I guess. But has the need for meaning ended for us, too? If so, why write meaningful novels? Why not just run a dairy in Oregon? It looks as if Kesey has never quite escaped the intellectual cul-de-sac that led him to throw LSD parties instead of writing.

Perhaps this is actually an attempt at a novel without any search for meaning, a novel about immersion in life. Nearly all the story action takes place in four chapters, and the remaining 17 concern themselves with inconsequentialities, mostly loafing, drinking and chat.

Kuinak, the Alaskan village, is as full of colorful lowlifes as “Cannery Row”--by no coincidence, it even has a hotel called the Bear Flag. It’s nowhere near as much fun, though, because scarcely any of them has a distinctive voice, and many are gratuitously improbable (one can do square roots in his head faster than they can be keyed into a calculator; an ornery Cornish sea cap’n turns out to be one of the greatest chefs in the world).

There are countless digressions. The beloved children’s tale about a crippled Eskimo spoon maker is printed in full, taking up pages 159 to 194 (the reader may suspect the movie version will be about as gripping as “Clan of the Cave Bear”). At the height of the apocalyptic storm, the narrative is interrupted to explain how an unlicensed radio broadcaster (a “disbarred doctor” from Australia) happened to move to Alaska.

In one chapter, Sallas flies off (for no reason even he can give) to rescue the square-root calculating genius, Billy (The Squid) Bellisarius, from a religious cult. The rescue party escapes on a runaway railroad handcar racing downhill to Skagway, where it fortunately flies off the tracks into the sea so they don’t all get killed. It’s the most exciting passage in the book, but we wonder why they didn’t just fly back in Sallas’ airplane.

Mostly there is talk--aimless, irritatingly self-conscious talk. The characters bray and banter and chide and chaff, straining for wry, pseudo-folkish bons mots no matter whether they’re fishing or falling in love or facing death in a runaway handcar. Father Pribilof, the Russian Orthodox priest, even joshes with God (“Very well, Show-off!”) as if He were an old fraud like himself.

Most of the characters’ lines--including some of the women’s--sound as if they were meant to be read by Burl Ives. The excruciating dialogue (one character actually says, “Farewell, gentles all,” to his drinking buddies) could have something to do with the stitched- together quality of the plot. The characters’ rueful familiarity might reflect their resentment at being forced into action that doesn’t proceed from character.

Kesey’s old mastery still shows here and there, notably in descriptions of nature (the storm is a pip), but everything else in this book is shot through with unease, as if some deep evasion is going on. Whatever’s eating Kesey, it has--alas for him, and alas for us--made him forget nearly everything he once knew about telling a story.