Rough Sailing : Sometimes best of intentions can sink without a trace : SIGNALS OF DISTRESS,<i> By Jim Crace (Farrar Straus & Giroux: $21; 277 pp.)</i>

In 1986, the British writer Jim Crace gained recognition for “Continent,” his first work of fiction, by winning three national book prizes. Set in an imaginary continent, it strung together seven narratives, each of which explored the destructive effect of modern development on an earlier civilization. His second novel, “The Gift of Stones,” was set in the late Stone Age and attracted equally enthusiastic notices. John Fowles compared it to the work of William Golding. Frank Kermode called him a virtuoso. His third, “Arcadia,” while not universally admired, was still praised for its brilliant writing by the New York Times reviewer. Why is it, then, that his latest novel, “Signals of Distress,” leaves me so cold?

Set in November 1836, it narrates the grounding of an American sailing ship off Wherrytown, an imaginary small fishing village in southwest England. The captain and his crew, including a black slave who works in the galley, are forced to hole up in the village’s only inn. The inn’s other guests are a newly married couple waiting to immigrate to Canada in the sailing vessel and Aymer Smithe, a partner in a Midlands soap manufacturing firm that once bought all the kelp the villagers could harvest but is now using a more economical alternative.

Aymer, the principal character, is an inveterate do-gooder who feels it his duty to inform the villagers in person of their new redundancy. Needless to say he is not popular with the locals, to whom he offers free bars of soap as recompense. He antagonizes the American captain of the ship by releasing Otto, the black slave, who runs off into the darkness and is not seen again. He lusts after the wife waiting to immigrate to the New World. He plays with the idea of marrying the illiterate daughter of an impoverished kelper and turning her into a paragon of middle-class mediocrity. Instead he impregnates her mother in the course of losing his virginity.

This partial summary makes the novel sound more concerned with sex than it is. Its principal focus is the largely negative effects of Aymer’s philanthropy. A “Sceptic, a Radical and an active Amender,” he sets the ship’s slave free for the highest of motives. But, as the captain points out, the poor liberated slave is likely to die of starvation and cold.

What else happens? The sailing ship gets repaired. One of the sailors falls in love with the illiterate daughter and sails off with her. The villagers land a massive catch of pilchards. And the novel ends with a public announcement that the ship struck ice off Novia Scotia and sank with all hands on board (a notice that Crace reproduced from the Public Archive there and which may have formed the original germ of the novel).

What has happened to the slave? We never learn his fate. The novel sets up an opposition between a well-meaning emancipator and a “humane” slave owner but never resolves it.

The novel constantly leads the reader up blind alleys. Aymer attends a boxing match between an Englishman and an African whom he thinks might be the missing slave. Against all odds the African wins. Are we to read some kind of hidden message into this parallel with the escaped slave? If so, what?

The village’s most celebrated tourist attraction is Cradle Rock, which can be set swaying if pushed at the right spot. Toward the end a group of drunken American sailors from the ship pushes the rock so violently it comes off its pivot and falls to the beach. “The Rock was down. The coast would never be the same again.” The villagers assume “the blackie done it.” The reader knows better. “That’s going to end up in the sea,” the captain comments. Obviously. But what of it?

Crace has said that he writes traditional stories in an ancient mode instead of conventional stories in a modern mode. An old-fashioned teller of yarns, he presents the facts and leaves the reader to supply the emotions. But Aymer’s penchant for moralizing everything defeats the author’s intentions. Take a typical instance. The sailing ship is passing a steam packet. “It seemed to Aymer that the tussling spirits of the age were passing on the sea; the old, the new, the wind, the steam, the modest and the brash.”

Clearly Crace favors the modest past over modern brashness. Yet it is the spirit of modernity that frees the slave, which may be why the slave disappears from the narrative. Even the language is at odds with itself. At times we are offered an authentic rendering of the vocabulary of the early 19th century. Food becomes “Victuals, Viands and Potations.” City ladies’ dresses are made of “crapes, tarlatans and bombazines.”

Yet Crace is no Peter Ackroyd who can unerringly reproduce the historical speech patterns. Instead he adopts a neutral modern style that is weighed down with the hint of blank verse rhythms. Aymer’s “sentences were under canvas. Their sails were full of wind.” So is Aymer, the unlikable protagonist of this yarn of an age fortunately long gone.