A View From the High Wire : THE CIRCUS OF THE EARTH AND THE AIR, <i> By Brooke Stevens (Harcourt Brace & Co.: $23.95, 410 pp.)</i>

I’ve never liked the circus. Even as a child, I saw it as a place of terror, not mirth, with contortionists and sideshow freaks performing grotesque, unnatural acts, and the red gashes of paint that outlined the clowns’ mouths looking less like smiles than open wounds. To my mind, there was always a dangerous quality about the Big Top, a horrible nightmare world taking shape in the shadows, which was all the more frightening because it tapped into something--archetypal memories, perhaps--that seemed to exist within me, as well. It was as if the circus represented a curious parallel universe, primeval and symbolic, residing beneath the placid surface of everyday reality, but able to reach out and pull us into the maelstrom at any time.

Brooke Stevens’ first novel, “The Circus of the Earth and the Air,” unfolds in such a universe, where logic derives from intuition, and nothing is what it seems. The book opens simply enough, as schoolteacher Alex Barton and his wife, Iris, frolic in the Atlantic Ocean off the Martha’s Vineyard-like island of Verre.

The Bartons are delightfully happy; watching Iris in the water, Alex thinks of “how much he loved her and how strange and lucky it was that they were together.” But their happiness is short-lived, for no sooner do they return to shore than they discover “a tall circular tent, a circus tent with red, yellow, and blue stripes on its roof.” Because they don’t have enough money for admission, Iris volunteers to participate in the circus’s disappearing act, where she is put into a wooden coffin and set on fire. When the smoke clears, she is gone, and by the next morning, the circus itself has vanished too, along with any trace that it was ever there.

Alex’s quest to find his wife becomes the engine that drives this novel, which moves from Verre to Manhattan to an uncharted Atlantic island to the Deep South and finally back to Verre, an itinerary that, like the circus it hopes to track down, is circular, “defined by the ring.”

Although he begins by going to the authorities, pretty soon Alex is on his own, making deductions from whatever incidental evidence he can uncover, evidence that mostly takes the form of anecdotes, things overheard or glimpsed from the corner of his eye. A policeman encourages him to pay attention to his dreams; a waitress introduces him to a man who talks about the Great Volenti, on whose private island of Cea an army guards a hollowed-out mountain full of circus performers who worship the stage as if it were a God. By themselves, these details are little more than hints, rumors, with no specific connection to Iris or her fate. But when Alex sneaks onto Cea and joins first the army and then the circus in the mountain, he starts to see the world in a new way, and to understand that his search, while ostensibly for the woman he loves, is really a pursuit of the essence of his being.

Of course, quest novels can be difficult, since, for them to function, we must believe in the importance of the object being sought, as well as the characters and situations of the narrative itself. But for the most part, Stevens gets the job done because of the straightforward way he tells what is, at times, a difficult story, in which meaning is always a step ahead of us, and the true nature of things is not revealed until the end.

One way he does this is by using a flat, affectless prose that reports what’s going on simply and without reaction, registering little surprise at the most fantastic turns of plot; another is by anchoring his book in the living details of the world. Thus, locations like New York and Mississippi are described to evoke their real identities, and the mystical island of Cea--with its strange, faceless army and its subterranean circus--also becomes an environment we can see, where the circus and its menagerie must be properly ventilated for the performers and animals to survive, and in Volenti’s study hangs a framed, handwritten letter from Franklin Roosevelt, thanking him for his “contributions regarding troop movement” during World War II.

Equally important is Steven’s conception of the circus as a spiritual force, an almost religious discipline that demands of its adherents the devotion of true believers. Even the secret army of Cea is but a training ground for performers.

Among the most fascinating and unexpected aspects of “The Circus of the Earth and the Air” is Alex’s transformation from teacher to tightrope walker, from a man who once fled the stage in absolute fear to an acrobat who, “(c)arrying a plate of his favorite meal, macaroni, . . . will cross to the center of the tightwire, make himself comfortable, and enjoy his dinner.” When it comes to describing the dynamics of a circus--the way performers interact with one another, and the dedication they bring to their skills--Stevens knows his stuff; he worked for years as a tiger groom with Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey, and he’s clearly spent a lot of time considering what the whole thing means. His ideas on the subject heighten the significance of Alex’s experience, providing a context in which he can hunt for Iris both physically and spiritually, while at the same time coming to terms with himself.

Paradoxically, however, Stevens’s philosophical discussions of “the ring”--which pebble “The Circus of the Earth and the Air” like rocks in an open field--represent the one major area where the novel stumbles, veering from narrative into rhetoric, fiction into cant. After all, while I’m sure that for many performers, “there’s an emptiness, a yearning inside . . . that only the ring can eliminate,” it seems an overstatement to claim that “circuses are sanity, pure sanity . . . it is only after your eyes become a circus that you can see your life as it really is.”

Instead, such passages read like justifications, as if Stevens were trying to make his point with too much force. More apropos, I think, is Volenti’s sentiment: “Never trust a circus, never, never, never trust a circus! . . . They’ll tell you one thing and they’ll do another. They take pride in their dirty lies. . . . Never believe a word a circus tells you! . . . To rely on a circus for anything is unforgivable, a mistake, a terrible unforgivable mistake. . . .”