A Woman’s Tempest : INDIGO, <i> by Marina Warner (Simon & Schuster: $21; 316 pp.)</i>

This is the year when--courtesy of Susan Sontag’s “The Volcano Lover”--historical romance has been officially reclaimed from the service basement in the house of fiction. So we acknowledge the truth once more: that serious people still require their dream of a place in time where innocence and true love might, for one instant, have existed. The sincere homage romance pays to wishing is its magnetic power source--which British writer Marina Warner invokes in her new novel “Indigo,” a rich, ambitious book that recombines elements of Shakespearean drama, Caribbean exotica and imperial myth-making.

Warner has been better known until now for her work in women’s history; she’s the author of major studies of the cult of the Virgin Mary, and of Joan of Arc. With “Indigo,” her fifth novel, this may change. The book starts out in contemporary London, with a Cinderella motif: Miranda Everard, child heiress to a lineage dating back to the Elizabethan conquest of a Caribbean island, has just been displaced by the birth of Xanthe, her grandfather’s daughter by a late second marriage. Miranda is dark, sweet-tempered and has Creole blood from her dead grandmother’s side. Xanthe, the younger and favored child, is a blond English ice-princess, but to even the score she is cursed like the Sleeping Beauty by an angry guest at her christening, so she’ll never find satisfaction in her life: “Nothing, not all the abundance and heap of riches, friends, loves and gifts of body and mind, of clothes, would ever be enough.”

This opening sequence is a brilliant creation, featuring an old and scandalous Prince of the House of Windsor (happily no shortage of those), and dominated by Sir Anthony Everard, former Colonial gentleman and world-class athlete in the island game of “Flinders,” invented presumably by Warner and sounding like a cross between cricket and jai alai. But the character who gives the tale its fairytale glamour is Serafine, the mulatto nurse from the island. She believes in the daughters of this family she’s served for three generations as a kind of royalty. Without her, what’s basically a coming- of-age story of two rather typical English society girls, one naively decent, the other more sophisticated and not so nice, would be in danger of collapsing into banality.

Marina Warner is too smart a writer not to be aware of the problem her Everards present, as an exhausted clan set adrift in the modern world. She takes the first opportunity to dive back into the 16th-Century story of the first Everard’s invasion of her imaginary island of Liamuiga--how he made himself an aristocrat through conquest and the importation of slaves. For this narrative, Warner borrows the names of Shakespeare’s island natives in “The Tempest” and re-imagines the witch Sycorax, mother of Caliban whom Prospero the European defeated, as a nurturant tribal wisewoman. Sycorax presides here over a peaceable kingdom of tame beasts and fertile gardens, watching over the island waters from her tree-house aerie. For things are changing in the region:

“There was nothing on the island that Sycorax feared; but more incomers were expected from the sea. The strangers were passing more frequently; some drifted in on the spars of burst vessels, others sailed by in whole ships. They were also plying the local waterways in greater numbers than before--and nowadays when they landed, they were more often alive than they had been in the past.”

As it happens, the first victim of the English invasion is the garden of Sycorax herself, plundered and trashed. The old wisewoman has no defense against bullets or the driving force of greed behind them; she and her foster daughter Ariel are taken prisoner, and the bitterly familiar drama of rape disguised as courtship follows. Warner’s account of European destruction of the paradisiacal New World from a woman’s viewpoint is so vivid, eloquent and unsparing that when she pulls us back to the present, it’s hard to adjust.

Not that the links aren’t skillfully made between then and now, through evocation of the unquiet grave of Sycorax, and the deceived Ariel’s songs. But what I miss in the contemporary story is an equal urgency about the fates of the two Everard children, dark or fair. Miranda needs more of a quest in life than her vague yearning for “something ardent to be experienced.” True, she becomes an artist, but not a passionate one: “Concentration on her work,” we’re told, “rubbed her spirits as soothingly as a massage.” Though she has something of a sex life, it’s modestly veiled, and merges conveniently with the social conscience that brings her fulfillment in a racially integrated marriage.

Xanthe proves herself the truer Everard--she’s inherited both the Elizabethan ancestors’ lust for gold and their taste for luxurious clothes: “a well-cut shirt in fine blue lawn . . . coffee-colored satin jeans with contrast cream stitching and Cuban-heeled crimson boots.” It’s Xanthe who arranges their return to the island, bonds with a rich developer of dubious virility named Sy and builds up a successful casino resort there. In short, an ethically unwholesome person. Too bad that she’s hurried to a premature end, since the ethically unwholesome are the vital motors of historical romance ( vide Scarlett, and need one say more?).

But if “Indigo” can’t fully deliver on the dazzling promise of its first 200 pages, it’s still a wonderfully persuasive novel of place. The island Liamuiga, with its gardens and magical long-lived trees, waterfalls and volcanic hot springs, finally commands the imagination more strongly than do the people who lay successive claim to it. In an age of deracination, perhaps the romance of the lost good place is becoming the definitive love story: If so, Warner’s already right there.