BOOK REVIEW / FICTION : An Uneven Trip Through the Past Leads to Humanity : THE MISERABLES <i> by Damien Wilkins</i> ; Harcourt Brace, $22.95, 298 pages

Damien Wilkins’ sentences swarm like sea fog under a brilliant sun--descending in heavy patches to obscure the water, then lifting suddenly to show it gilded.

Wilkins’ “The Miserables,” set in the author’s native New Zealand, tells of a backward pilgrimage. Brett Healey, the book editor of a Christchurch newspaper, travels to his parents’ home in Wellington, on the North Island, for the funeral of his grandfather.

Scenes from the days he spends there and on the ferry trip back are joined to his recollections. By the end, a word-bound intellectual has begun to free himself from his aesthetic conclusions and implant himself in the human premises from which they grew.

It is a common fictional scheme: using a ceremonial event such as a funeral or a reunion to let the past instruct the present and the present recast the past while the protagonist travels and grows. Wilkins uses it in occasionally uncommon ways, some of them illuminating, and some murky and overly elaborate.

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The account of the burial and the mourners is faintly patronizing. The insights are at once over-complicated and callow. The author has taken the deliberate risk of observing through Brett’s eyes, estranging us momentarily from both the character and its creator. Immediately, though, he shifts.

From a thinly pompous narrative we go to a nighttime conversation among Brett’s mother and his three aunts, with Brett present but silent. Their voices are alive, distinct.

Tenderness for the past is ventilated by splinters of cool insight. They speak of their father’s emotional and physical absences. Perhaps he had a woman on the side, one sister suggests. “He had himself on the side,” another rejoins. A third reflects that their mother’s reliable warmth was less exciting than their father’s unpredictable sunbursts.

Wandering around the hills of Wellington where he was raised, Brett visits a lawyer with whom he had played as a child. Brett finds him stiffly judgmental; he feels himself categorized as literary. He will come to realize, as they talk of the past, that he in turn has categorized the other man.

He passes the house where a cousin lived, bombed out for years on drugs. He was the family failure, but Brett learns that when the grandfather was in a nursing home, the cousin visited him weekly. The young hippie and the old free-thinker hit it off splendidly.

Brett’s older brother, a zoologist, is unable to make it back from England, but an encounter with a woman who once knew him moves Brett to reassemble his recollections into a more complex picture. A telephone call to his wife adds a note of warmth; it also prompts a memory of his sexual loneliness as an adolescent and his unsuccessful effort to make an impression on a schoolmate named Karen.

Bit by bit he recalls his grandfather: a golden day spent with him at the races; the old man’s gift of an English copy of “Les Miserables,” whose title the grandson thought of as “The Miserables.” He recalls a difficult task in later life lightened, as if genetically, by the example of his grandfather’s gaiety. He can admit how much he loved him.

Wilkins’ assemblage of bits of past and present can seem mechanical--a walk, a sight, a memory; another walk and sight and memory. Some of the assemblages are too lavish and complex to be easily followed: multiple connections that don’t quite connect, overbooked epiphanies with no space to be performed.

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The writing can also be overloaded. Referring to Brett’s time in a university in the Midwest, the author interjects with arbitrary showiness “a name which implied a kind of prevaricating, a hovering, neither one thing nor the other.” Some of the sentences wind and twist in layers of wrapping. The point, not always successful, is to evoke the protagonist’s complex shifts of awareness.

Wilkins is best--brilliant, in fact--when he is less wrapped. He does the comedy as well as the pain of childhood. At a school assembly, Brett’s brother scissors in two the sweater of a boy standing in front of him. “Guess I wanted to see something,” the future scientist explains later. “It was like cutting cold spaghetti or old porridge. But that’s not it either. There’s nothing like it. A unique experience.”

On the late 200-mile ferry ride home, Brett is irritated by a chatty jogger pounding out laps and puts him down as a tiresome compulsive. Then they encounter a child huddled tearfully on the deck. Brett assumes he simply needs comforting; the jogger recognizes hypothermia. He orders Brett to help strip off the wet clothes.

The two men clasp each other, the child sandwiched in between, and dance him around the deck to get his circulation going.

More than even the most expressive of his memories, Brett’s odd moonlit dance graduates him into humanity.