BOOK REVIEW / FICTION : Trapped in a Crumbling World of Passion and Betrayal : THE CROCODILE BIRD <i> by Ruth Rendell</i> , Crown, $20, 352 pages

“The Crocodile Bird” starts with a beguiling first line--”The world began to fall apart at nine in the evening”--and, within a dozen pages or so, we are drawn into an elaborate labyrinth where seduction and betrayal, rape and murder are to be glimpsed in every dark corner.

Our guide through the maze is young Liza Beck, not yet 17, whom we first encounter as she is thrust out of a fairy-tale setting where she has been raised by her mother, Eve. Their home had been the gatehouse of Shrove House, a stately old manor in the English countryside, but now her mother is waiting to be arrested and Liza is on the run.

“She saw herself lost as she sometimes was in dreams,” author Ruth Rendell writes of the bewildered Liza. “Those were the kind of dreams she had, of wandering abandoned in a strange place, and weren’t all places strange to her?”

Only one place is not strange to Liza--although it strikes us as an exceedingly odd and scary place--and that is Shrove House. In a real sense, Shrove is the centerpiece of “The Crocodile Bird,” a place “as immovable as the landscape in which it rested, as natural and as serene,” and yet a place that is the scene of heartbreak and horror.

Shrove gives up its secrets, one by one, as Liza tells the story of her troubled life to an unschooled but gentle young vagabond named Sean. It is Sean who rescues her from the crumbling world of Shrove House--and it is through Sean’s love affair with Liza that the darker mysteries come into view.

“I don’t know ,” Liza tells Sean, “but I don’t think there’ve been many lives like mine.”

As Rendell draws us ever deeper into Liza’s curious childhood--and shows us the ever stranger things that happen at Shrove House--we are allowed to see how the world appears to a girl who reads the brooding poetry of Matthew Arnold at the age of 7 but does without school, playmates, indoor plumbing and a telephone or a television.

We see, too, that Liza is locked in an orbit around Eve, her loving but afflicted mother, a guardian who is also a kind of jailer. Eve is pure enchantment to her young daughter, and we soon realize that Eve is enchanting to rather too many men, and the wrong kind of men, but not enchanting enough to the one man who counted, the lord of the manor, Jonathan Tobias.

“You’re a bit of a devil, you know, Eve,” says Mr. Tobias, “and you know how to drive a man.”

And, still more ominously, we understand how Liza experiences the passion that flashes and thunders through the adult world, even in a place as isolated and idyllic as Shrove. Indeed, Rendell gives us the shocking experience of seeing what a failed rape and a successful murder look like through the eyes of a precocious but sheltered 4-year-old.

Above all, Liza realizes that Shrove matters more to her mother than the love of a mere mortal, whether it is Jonathan Tobias or her own daughter. Sean speaks aloud what we have already asked ourselves: How can Eve leave young Liza locked up alone in the library at Shrove when she goes marketing in the village eight miles away? “You might have hurt yourself,” says Sean, “or the place (might have) caught on fire.”

Liza has a chilling answer. She “thought but didn’t say that the place burning down would have been a bigger tragedy for Eve,” Rendell explains. “Shrove on fire would be worse than Liza dying in it.”

But, as it turns out, Shrove is on fire, at least in a metaphorical sense, with Eve’s passion, Eve’s bitter rage, Eve’s madness. The same fire burns in Liza, too, and we fear that it will consume her as it consumed her mother. By the end of “The Crocodile Bird,” the curse has come full circle--and we are not quite sure until the very last page whether Liza, like Eve, will go up in flames.

I suppose “The Crocodile Bird” can be described as a contemporary Gothic novel, but it is very much an updated and upscale Gothic. Rendell tells her story with such elegance and restraint, with such a literate voice and an insightful mind, that her book transcends the mystery genre and achieves something almost sublime.