POLLY’S GHOST By Abby Frucht; Scribner: 362 pp., $25 : THE FLAME TREES OF THIKA Memories of an African Childhood By Elspeth Huxley;Penguin: 282 pp., $12.95 paper : THE HOUSEGUEST By Agnes Rossi; Dutton: 294 pp., $23.95 : UNCLE PETROS & GOLDBACH’S CONJECTURE By Apostolos Doxiadis; Bloomsbury USA: 208 pp., $19.95

Only a novelist in cahoots with adjectives could choose for her main character not so much a dead mother but the dead mother’s immortal love for her child. This is what myths are peopled by, not human forms but the qualities that animate them: strength, courage, honor and love. Polly’s love is fierce, for her husband and for her three sets of twins. After she dies in childbirth with her seventh baby, Tip (the only non-twin), it takes her nine years of ghosthood to get close enough to him to influence his life. He was, she explains, the only one of her babies she never got to touch. This frustration whips through the novel like a night wind in the high mountains, making trees wail, dogs shiver and doors slam, and though she is only hoping to give a sign to her 9-year-old son sitting by a campfire, she makes a plane fall from the sky, killing the pilot. Tip is as physical as his mother is vaporous; this is his quality, and it is richly described: his perfect body, his exultation and perfection in lovemaking from the age of 15. The pilot’s ghost and the mother’s battle it out for the destiny of the boy, spinning the destinies of people down below who are, like all humans, only “helplessly themselves.”

THE FLAME TREES OF THIKA Memories of an African Childhood By Elspeth Huxley;Penguin: 282 pp., $12.95 paper

Six years old, that blunt and noble age, Elspeth Huxley rode a horse-drawn cart with her parents, Robin and Tilly, to a new home and possible fortune on a 500-acre yet-to-be-planted coffee plantation in a yet-to-be-settled corner of Kenya in 1913. The house the Kikuyu build for this Swiss Family Robinson has grass walls on which perch lizards and chameleons and sometimes the dreaded army ants. Tilly, a no-nonsense hero of a mother, clearly made everything stable enough so that the child could notice her surroundings with a bold eye--and vividly enough to set them down 46 years later. She remembers everything: “savage spearmen with naked limbs gliding towards us like eels,” the light from safari lanterns, “the enormous vastness of Africa.” And she remembers everyone: Lettice, her mother’s chestnut-haired friend and neighbor, and Hereward, her saber-rattling colonialist husband; Njombo the foreman with his many wives, and others. It is a charmed childhood, full of questions that Robin and Tilly are smart enough to try to answer--a lesson to parents of future memoirists! *

THE HOUSEGUEST By Agnes Rossi; Dutton: 294 pp., $23.95

There is a presence in “The Houseguest” whose power is greater and more compelling than any of the characters in the foreground. She is Maura, the 6-year-old child whose grief-stricken father abandons her--after her mother’s death in Ireland--to unkind aunts in his race to get away from all memories of his wife. Maura is a solemn little girl, grateful for the smallest consistency in her life, suspicious of the smallest kindness. The evil aunts send her to a convent, while her father--it is the 1930s--goes back to Paterson, N.J., (the second most compelling character in this oddly compelling novel) and tries to find a new life. Maura has very few lines in this story, but her disproportionate power lies in the fact that she is the very seed from which the novel was planted, based, as Agnes Rossi tells us in the frontispiece, on the life of the author’s own mother. One often sees, in fiction, an author trying to live and therefore understand his or her ancestors. Peopling fiction with the dead is, after all, something like recapturing one’s queen in a chess game--a triumph, fresh hope, a new game.

UNCLE PETROS & GOLDBACH’S CONJECTURE By Apostolos Doxiadis; Bloomsbury USA: 208 pp., $19.95

Kazuo Ishiguro is one of the great describers of obsession and genius, from his butler to his painter to his concert pianist, the standard to which all others could be held. Obsession is tricky subject matter because all of life’s details are recast by it--the narrowing focus in a character’s perception demands that the author draw the reader into the object of obsession, using both information and intuition. In this novel, less ambitious than any of Ishiguro’s, the obsession is pure mathematics. Uncle Petros is the mysterious black sheep of the family. His nephew, weaned on the aphorism “Seek only attainable goals” by his furious father, unravels his uncle’s past: Uncle Petros was a mathematical genius who, at 19, devoted himself to solving the unsolvable Goldbach’s Conjecture, the hypothesis that all events are the sum of two primes. “Uncle Petros” is a charming novel, but its characters lack depth; without this, the book is more an amusing lecture on mathematics than a convincing study of obsession. *