BOOK REVIEW : A Venture Into a Haunting Era : THE LIFE AND TIMES OF CAPTAIN N. <i> by Douglas Glover</i> ; Alfred A. Knopf $20; 178 pages

“The World Turned Upside Down” was a traditional British army band tune at the time of the American Revolution. It makes its appearance only fleetingly in Douglas Glover’s novel, set in the Revolutionary War era, but it is the theme around which the book is built, and splintered and driven against itself.

History is the nightmare from which Glover’s characters seek to escape and which swallows them up regardless. “The Life and Times of Captain N.” evokes a whirlwind that catches up each of their own particular fragments of the nightmare. It is placed in Upstate New York near the Canadian border, where Rebel and Tory sympathizers and Indian allies on each side fought in a sour and bloody confusion of purposes.

Initially on opposite side of the confusion, and then converging in a painful blur, are Hendrick and Oskar Nellis. Hendrick, the captain of the title, abandons his farm and his pro-Rebel family at the war’s outbreak to fight with a band of raiders composed of Tory settlers, Missasauga Indians and a few British regulars.

Oskar, his teen-age son and bitter antagonist, is a fervent follower of George Washington, to whom he writes letters and whom he serves as a courier and spy. When his father’s raiders capture him, he joins them while striving to go on being a spy. A permanent splitting headache afflicts him, and when he paints his face Indian-style, he divides it into red and black halves.

The headache and the split visage are both symbols and totems in this brief but intense philosophic novel, whose realism edges into hallucination and then into shamanic American Indian belief. Hendrick has an even more agonizing headache and wears an ornament that divides his face. Mary Hunsacker, the third principal character, has a third headache and a dividing scar caused by a near-scalping.

Mary is a captive of the Missasauga, who massacred her family on one of their raids. She is protected by their leader and becomes the lover of Scattering Light, one of the braves. She becomes partly Indian; and in a way, so do Hendrick and Oskar. Hendrick’s lover is the widow of an Indian who abducted her years earlier, and Oskar’s all but blood-brother is Tom, an Indian mask maker and clairvoyant. Tom foresees, among other miseries for his people, something he calls--incomprehensibly to Oskar--”the Interstate.”

The struggle between Hendrick and Oskar is a permanent war between father and son, and even at the end, when the former is dying and the latter is grievously wounded fighting on his side, each thinks of killing the other. But it is more than that. Hendrick justifies forcing Oskar to change sides: “I think, kidnaping him, I redeemed him from history.”

Hendrick, a tormented idealist, has set himself against the Revolution as if he too had foreseen the Interstate:

“The 5,000 Republicans seething up the trail behind us are the shape of a grand new idea, which I abhor,” he says. “They destroy everything in their path, scorching the earth, the earth-colored savages and their villages. They watch the forest itself with suspicion, measuring it with a cold, acquisitive eye. It is this measured, yet total, destructiveness which unnerves me. They are the future. I am against the future.”

Hendrick has chosen sides but Oskar’s divisions become steadily more inflamed. His early letters to Washington are full of boyish brag. Later, when he is fighting for the British, they are wonderfully perplexed. Perplexity turns to near-breakdown in a hallucinatory encounter with Mary, the “white” Indian. Glover has written a wonderful portrait of a young mind made for history’s certainties, and shattered by its brutal ambiguities.

“Captain N.” leads Oskar and Mary on a haunting journey out of their everyday settler lives into something far stranger. Mary’s account of the massacre of her family has the electric calm of sensory overload. The Missasauga brain her grandmother in her rocking chair, break her sister’s back by stomping on it, and toss the baby into the air, splitting him on their knives: “He tumbled end over end against the blue sky, twisting his head and shrieking, a mangle of blood and blue.”

Glover’s portrait of the Missasauga begins with an observant realism, in which there is charm as well as ferocity. But he falters when he attempts to pit the world of American Indian lore and spirituality as the counterpoise--more than Hendrick’s philosophic despair or Oskar’s uncertainties--to the invasion of history. The trouble is not the idea, but the way it is carried out.

More and more of the book is taken up by Mary’s voyage into the world of Shamanic belief. Glover tries to render it through chants, invocations and magic oratory. He never gets inside. Instead, the writing, falling short of authentic mystery, settles into a pretentious and high-flown effortfulness that makes us pause, not to meditate but to unstick our feet.