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In the Arrivals hall, after completing a long and disorienting flight, you are allowed briefly to entertain the question “What is life?” before life barrels through from Baggage Claim and claims you.

The New Zealand novelist Damien Wilkins floats half a dozen antipodean characters halfway around the world to raise this perennial mirage of a question. If they answer it, it is through their inability to do so. As the six blind men describing an elephant (it’s a rope, a spear, a wall and so on, depending on which part they get hold of): Each is right if there is no such thing as an elephant.

Wilkins’ New Zealanders and Australians pursue their various courses in and around London, no differently than another dozen or so characters they are involved with. Their bathwater drains down the same clockwise spiral. Still, a nagging awareness that elsewhere is a world where it drains counterclockwise allows the author to place them at a slight angle, as unconscious questioners and unsettlers.

None of Wilkins’ characters, antipodean or otherwise, have much weight, though most of them own quirky personalities. They come together and drift apart, partly against their will, as if dematerializing. Life offers little in the way of a ground and even less in the way of intimacy. Comically active or comically passive, each is unsure that the others exist or that he or she does.

The closest thing to a central figure in a novel whose characters flare and fade is Adrian. He is the son of Polish Catholics who immigrated to New Zealand, where the father became a prosperous builder. Hesitant and uncertain, Adrian finds his first real passion when an estranged girlfriend dies, leaving behind their little boy, Daniel. Adrian wins custody from the child’s maternal grandparents and, seeking resolution for an irresolute life, takes Daniel to London.

Here he drifts among a whole galaxy of characters whose interactions, comic, hostile and often mysteriously subliminal, spin a cosmology as frail and entangling as a spider web. Each character and encounter is an incipient point of departure that gives way to other points of departure. Each dazzles for a bit, seemingly on the point of becoming a main route; each diminishes or disappears partway along. Disconnected bits are sandwiched in: a radio play written by a character’s mother, the transcript of a psychoanalytic session with a patient who does not otherwise appear. It is a “Canterbury Tales” without a Canterbury.

Adrian’s cousin, Stefan, jealous, hypersensitive and a sketch of comic pain, tries to set himself up as Adrian’s and Daniel’s guide and protector. Adrian moves in, instead, with David and Catherine, ex-hippie New Zealanders who squat in a derelict building and whose mutual attachment is dissolving into mutual loathing.

Adrian enters Daniel in a Catholic school; his interview with the principal, an up-to-date nun, is a wonderful display of mutual misdirection. He gets a job working for Tim, a prosperous, hilariously self-centered publisher of terrible books.

Adrian’s arrival in London converges with the arrival of another New Zealander. Emily, studying in the United States and working as a nanny for a divorced American woman lawyer, stops off on her way to deliver Michaela, her poisonous 8-year-old charge, to the girl’s father in Germany. As irresolute and perplexed as Adrian, Emily hopes for a rendezvous with her blithely egoistic Spanish lover, Xavier, but he stands her up.

She does meet Sarah, a New Zealand schoolmate working with growing sourness as a nanny for Tim, his Australian wife, Jilly, and their three children. Sarah invites Emily and Michaela for a weekend at her employers’ country place; at the same time, Tim invites Adrian and Daniel. They crowd into Tim’s automobile, all these fretful strivings and half-fledged passions. Also two children sleeping soundly on laps. “A sleeping child,” Tim reflects driving through the Somerset night, “is an insect bite that doesn’t itch.”

It is one of many perfect sentences in “Little Masters,” a novel that enchants and irritates. Wilkins writes whole sequences of scenes that are by turns comic, tender and achingly inspired. There is Tim, the genial self-centered lord of his publishing company, sardonically indulged by his two titled young women assistants and grabbing the phone to bark out details about his sensitive bowels to the New York publishers he plans to visit. There is Tim at home: awkward, unsure in dealing with Jilly, his high-strung unhappy wife, and weeping at the death of his dog.

Adrian visits a temperamental author in the country, spends an awkward evening and has to get up in the middle of the night to help put out a fire in the garage. In a comically surreal digression, his host drives a friend’s old car through the Netherlands and is stopped by the highway police. Declaring it a virtual wreck, they order him out; he watches helplessly as a mobile crusher rolls up and converts his friend’s vehicle into a cube of metal. Helpfully, the police volunteer to ship it back to the owner, adding as if to reassure: “There are not many of these so bad cars left in Holland.”

The country house weekend aims to be a crucible; a kind of simultaneous trying and transmuting of assembled passions and crises, of undercurrents that flood and submerge, of unseen strains that tighten and release. Jilly, awkward, arrogant and insecure, begins a flirtation with a young Belgian entomologist, one of a team that has built an egg-shaped structure on the grounds to study tropical insects. The flirtation, which is mostly in her imagination, is presented with devastating wit and subtlety. So is a subsequent scene in which Jilly, humiliated and furious, discovers that the Belgian is sleeping with Sarah, her nanny.

Adrian’s hosts, David and Catherine, arrive, quarrel and break up. Michaela is bitten by one of the tropical spiders. There is a blizzard. A flock of sheep gets in and crowds into the living room, where little Daniel, spookily adept, keeps them in order.

Adrian and Emily, drawn to each other, seem about to become lovers, but a chill sets in and the moment passes. It is one of the many deflected expectations in a book that continually incites and disperses them. We are tantalized; a dozen characters compel our attention, beguile us, beckon us to follow their stories and quietly go missing.

The country house finale is reminiscent of those sinuous multiple transformations that occur at the end of an Iris Murdoch novel. But here the threads, instead of gathering into a skein, keep breaking off. Wilkins is a witty and sentient writer. As in a far-north autumn dawn, his sun blazes entrancingly on the horizon; then, instead of rising, it sets. This is at least partly deliberate. The author, after human complexity, distrusts human climaxes and seeks to communicate his distrust. He does communicate it, but that does not mean it is not frustrating.