War adventure -- a casualty of timing?

This is, perhaps, an inopportune time to publish “The Far Reaches.” The bloody battle against the Japanese in which Homer Hickam sets his novel, the U.S. military’s struggle for the Pacific atoll Tarawa, took place 54 years ago, in November 1943.

For some who were there and survived the slaughter, time has softened or worn away the memories. It’s an episode to be recalled upon request. For others, though, memories of the fight for Tarawa, one of the most brutal in U.S. history, remain too vivid to be shelved or tucked away, a quivering ball of horror.

In the three-day amphibious assault, about 1,000 Marines were killed and nearly 2,300 U.S. fighters were grievously wounded, Hickam writes in an author’s note with references to the battle. The Japanese, “who fought nearly to the last man,” he says, lost 4,713 men.

Oddly, for a writer whose key to the reader is building sympathy for his characters, these appallingly high figures seem to make Hickam sore.

“Another way of looking at it,” he writes, is that “nearly 30 percent of the 12,000 Americans who participated in the landing were either killed or incapacitated by wounds.” Ninety of 125 U.S. landing craft were sunk or wrecked.

“The battle was three days of bloody mayhem. One wonders what the reaction of the United States public would be today after such a horrendous ‘victory.’ ” (At the time, thanks to the news media brought along to record what was expected to be certain victory, photos of dead Marines washing onto Tarawa’s beaches were splashed across U.S. newspapers, shocking the nation. A congressional investigation into the heavy losses was halted only after the Marine Corps commandant made a personal plea.)

Hickam, a former infantryman in Vietnam and author of such books as “Rocket Boys,” “October Skies” and “We Are Not Afraid,” is as scornful of contemporary Japanese as he is of today’s antiwar Americans. “In 2004,” he writes in the author’s note, “the Japanese sent 600 troops to Iraq, principally to support a variety of humanitarian projects, including water purification. Japanese citizens instantly began to fret over the safety of their soldiers, demanding that everything possible be done to keep them out of actual combat and to bring them home as soon as possible.

“Obviously,” he adds, “there have been a few changes in the mindset of both Americans and Japanese since the 1940s.”

Just as obviously Hickam doesn’t like the change.

He had a nice thing worked out -- “The Far Reaches” is the third in a series of action books (“The Keeper’s Son,” “The Ambassador’s Son”) in which Josh Thurlow, a North Carolina-based Coast Guard commander of awesome brain and brawn, roams the world during World War II, taking the armchair traveler with him.

Hickam has worked out a satisfactory plot, with subplots appended. The hellish roar and crash of warfare subsides long enough for his characters to speak several long sentences to one another, uninterrupted by inconveniently noisy explosions.

It is not unfair to Hickam to point out that his adventure novel has been overrun by the great clamorous confusion of real and bloody wars in Iraq and Afghanistan whose outcomes are unknown and whose human costs cannot yet be calculated. (The current newspaper accounts can only hint at the horror. The short stories and novels that will try to show those wars in all their baffling and terrifying complexity will come later.)

In the meantime, let the reader enjoy, if possible, a war story set half a world and half a century away that features a beautiful young Irish nun who rescues a wounded Thurlow in an outrigger canoe off Tarawa. As she and her Polynesian flock try to return to their nearby home islands, the Far Reaches, she -- and Thurlow -- find themselves caught most improbably between the invading Americans and the defending Japanese on an atoll in the far-away South Pacific.

Anthony Day is a former editor of The Times’ editorial pages.