A Love Story Against All Odds : Father, son and woman who loves them stand at the center of a political drama : NIGHTLINES, <i> By Neil Jordan (Random House: $21; 194 pp.)</i>

In the days when we were told stories and believed in them, “once upon a time” was a reassuring invocation. Reassuring because it meant that there would be a story and that it was about to begin, but also for another reason. It promised an ending down the way that was not a shattering of the story but part of it. “Once,” with its mortality, was laid neatly “upon” the bosom of “time,” which existed before and during, and would exist afterward. It lifted our small, soon-vanishing boats in the swell of an unvanishing sea.

In Neil Jordan’s short novel, whose scrappy historical busyness is redeemed by the odd and lovely three-way love story at its center, the sea acts as the once upon a time. It binds the sometimes forced events together; more important, it connects three uneasy and inchoate passions in a notion of life that gives them repose and meaning.

“Nightlines” (also the title of a novella by another Irish writer, John McGahern) ranges, as Jordan’s film “The Crying Game” did, between the large-scale gestures of politics and the compacted incandescence of the personal. As in the film, Jordan revs up his personal with a shock of the bizarre. The peculiar hearts of a father, a son and the woman who loves them both are as revolutionary, in a small space and compressed moment, as the flag-waving causes that rampage across a society and an era.

The Spanish Civil War, Nazi espionage at the outbreak of World War II and the German effort to forge links with the clandestine remnants of the Irish Republican Army all play parts in “Nightlines.” They are not the important or best parts; they dilate the canvas but are thinly painted. What is of moment, and written with poetic force, takes place in a house on the stormy seafront at Bray, a Victorian resort just down the coast from Dublin.

In that house, over the book’s 15-year span, live Donal Gore, his widowed father, and Rose, who arrived at 18 or so to give piano lessons to Donal, 11 or 12 at the time. A brief passion flares when he is in his teens; she succumbs briefly and then ends it. A few years later she marries the father, a high official in the Irish government.

Bitterly raging, Donal runs off to join the Republicans in Spain, is captured, and eventually released, by Franco insurgents. He returns to find his father mute and totally paralyzed by a stroke. He and Rose tend him lovingly and become lovers. For a while they live, the three of them, in a strange idyll that Jordan’s canted vision and touch of quicksilver manage to extract from its melodramatic possibilities.

Threaded through the private story, in a nervously disjointed back and forth, are several public ones. There is Donal with his fellow Republican prisoners, waiting for the firing squad that picks them out one by one. Each section of this flashback is too contrived and prefaced with a line from a Latin Mass that the prison priest is saying.

There is the German Abwehr officer, Hans, who frees Donal and drives him across Spain to Barcelona whence, because of “representations” from the Irish government, he will be repatriated. Hans, a former physicist who despises the Nazis but takes an intellectual pride in his espionage skills, taps Donal to link up with IRA saboteurs in Dublin. Instead, once home, he works with the Irish authorities to trap them.

In “The Crying Game,” Jordan made his IRA characters murderous fanatics. Here, he makes them comic stooges. Three burly men in dark suits bicycle down from Dublin and gravely apprise Donal of their scheme to devastate British wartime morale: by dynamiting, no less, the wax figures of the royal family at Mme. Tussaud’s. It all ends with Irish patrol craft nabbing them as they rendezvous offshore with Hans--a highbrow stooge, this one, with a campy passion for “Gone With the Wind”and a faint lech for Donal--as he clambers out of a surfacing U-boat.

Jordan’s point in presenting great events as farce and history as pratfall is clear enough, but his timing is off and he has no delicate touch. Instead of highlighting his real story--private passions as great events--he occasionally blinds it. This said, he has written a book whose strangeness is part of its beauty.

The sea begins and ends it. At the start, Donal’s mother is dying; on the beach outside the house, Donal and his stiff father are engaged in the daily rite that, unspoken, links man and child. They bait the hooks on a nightline; by morning the tide will retreat and mackerel will flap in the air. Later Donal remembers: “The reaping was never as rich as the sowing.” The words are the current on which the story will move.

Using his cinematic gift, the author flashes a series of shots. The maid appears on the beach, wringing her hands, the doctor jumps from his car at a run; suddenly the father bolts up to the house with a mewing cry like a sea gull’s. After the wake, the father puts Donal to bed with an odd question: “What’s my name?” “You’re my father,” the child answers. The father presses him. “Your name’s Sam.” “That’s right,” he said, and wiped his cheek and left.

It is a tiny detail in a wasteland of bereavement. The man, solitary and reserved, has lost the only person who knew him as Sam. Over and over, Jordan strikes a point of incandescence that lights up a story of silent contention and silent love between father and son.

Rose arrives on a stormy day, drenched by a wave that jumps the seafront and smashes at the door. She is a woman of down-to-earth beauty, passionate and honorable and torn between the two. We see Donal, still a child, gleefully spying on Rose’s evening walks with his father and their hint of tenderness. We see the fierce sensuality that erupts between teacher and her now-adolescent pupil, and the effort of will on both sides that damps it--only to have it flare up, still later, with Donal’s fury at the news that she and his father will marry.

Jordan’s writing is at its taut and shining best after Donal returns to find his father silent and rigid in a wheelchair. He is free now to care for him, to push him along the beach, to rig the nightlines, to be the father while the father, helpless, is the child. The erotic tension with Rose spills over. They feel guilty, but Jordan remarkably conveys the happiness that possesses them. A three-way love, against grotesque odds, finds a way to prevail, at least for a while.

There are some harsh turns, a final severity and a reconciliation. Jordan improbably persuades us of it; he even gets us past the hurdle of having the father rise from his chair, walk into the sea and come back as a ghost to make the healing explicit. It is outrageous but, oddly, not arbitrary. Jordan already had made us know that reconciliation ran in the three memorable passions at the seaside house. The ghost takes on no dramatic burden; as if it were a journal or a postscript, it simply lets us know why we knew it.