Solving the Big Mysteries : THE BUNGALOW by Lynn Freed , (Poseidon Press: $21; 210 pp. )

Ruth Frank, the narrator of this deeply absorbing and ambitious novel, has returned from a failing marriage in the United States to her native South Africa. Her mother, narcissistic and resourceful, an aging actress still seeking stardom wherever it may be found, urges Ruth to write a book. “Why not write a murder mystery? Something for the American market?” she asks, in one of several sly comments the book offers about itself. But Ruth’s is not a murder mystery, though a murder occurs and the sense of a mystery underwrites Ruth’s urgent need to define who she is.

Rather, the novel Ruth gives us is a life mystery. Ruth herself must struggle with large questions. What do we owe to others, and what is rightfully ours? How are we to act when to be true to ourselves is to betray another? Where shall our deepest loyalties reside? To self, lover, parent, child? To country, culture, race, religion, history, the future? Is exile a form of freedom or imprisonment? And what does it mean to be “at home”?

Ruth herself finds that she feels “at home”--at least for a time--in the bungalow that belonged to Hugh Stillington, the man whose child she conceives and carries even while she is still married to Clive. It is Hugh who is murdered. “Nothing had changed out here. With its bottle-green wicker and worn rush matting, its flowered linen slipcovers and teak and brass and bits of dinner and silver services that had survived a succession of unsupervised servants, Hugh’s bungalow still seemed as it had seemed before--beyond the reach of normal life and rules.”

Lynn Freed has a gift for describing the accouterments and accessories of life, the objects that adorn our days. It is easy to immerse oneself in the world of this book, though the author makes sure that we are disturbed by it too. This world is materialistic, racist, secretive. It is a world in which Gentile and Jew, black and brown and white, male and female, English and South African and American, even different tribes crisscross dangerously.

In this jammed, constricted world, it is perhaps not entirely an accident that Ruth hits a pedestrian as she is driving, late at night, to the bungalow--an event that resonates ominously. This is a world where, even when there is no murder, there is the possibility of murder, “the atmosphere of the times . . . this violence everywhere we look,” as one character says. Ruth herself knows that “tiny microphones could be buried in the walls, or under bushes, relaying every sound, every whisper, to the government. The servants themselves could be doubling as informers.”

In such a world, every word one dares to speak “frankly” acquires a political meaning, whether one wants it or not. Ruth, also the narrator of Freed’s equally wonderful earlier book, “Home Ground,” about childhood in a Jewish theater family in South Africa, speaks here in an urgent, intimate, confessional voice, a voice that hopes to tell the whole truth and nothing but the truth. She shows us these people in all their self-centered greediness, their lack of awareness, their racism. Some of these observations lead to marvelous social satire, a comedy of manners: “Sundays without servants was something new among the rich. A number of people were taking it up, together with gourmet cooking lessons, Magimixes and dishwashers.”

Near the beginning of the book, Krishnah Chowdres, whose fate as a wanderer and a writer is counterpointed to Ruth’s, asks sarcastically, “Please be so good as to tell me if I am to understand that we are facing an act of heroism on your part in returning to this country?” But this is precisely the question that Ruth must eventually ask herself. What is heroism, and where is it to be found?

Ruth’s questioning is carried out in the context of her visit home, which has been prompted by her father’s heart attack. Her parents and their complicated relationship to each other, her sister and in-laws and friends, her love affair and pregnancy, her interleaved memories of marriage in the States, clarify this intellectual drama in all the terms of the heart.

And then there is South Africa, the landscape itself, which Freed describes with an attentiveness that suggests love: “A thick-leaved bush with waxy flowers that smelled like fresh meat. A column of giant red ants, snaking up the trunk of the mango tree. . . . There was a giant bread tree with leaves like teeth, growing in a corner.”

Here is a book, then, that presents itself on several planes: It is the involving story of a young woman remaking her life. It is the moving story of an adult daughter learning who her parents are, and were. It is the recurrent story of a writer finding her authoritative voice. It is the unsettling, funny and appalling story of a society that does not know or trust itself. It is the astonishingly vivid story of a country whose relationship to its own physical presence is profound.

“You could . . . bring in all sorts of wild animals, that sort of thing,” Ruth’s mother says, plotting her novel for her. “You know how mad Americans are about wild animals? Make it exciting , make it romantic !” And so the author has, but she has made it serious, too, in a way that obliges Americans to ask what we owe to others, what it means to be free, faithful and at home, here.