The searchers

Set amid the “low-level hum of anxiety” that accompanies contemporary life, Janette Turner Hospital’s eighth novel is about a musician and is based on a Greek myth. But if this suggests Elysian simplicity, forget it. No book by this nervy, dynamic Australian-born author is ever anything less than intricate and deeply disquieting.

Hospital, who teaches at the University of South Carolina, has lived in many countries, and her books share the same global restlessness. “The Ivory Swing” features a young Canadian woman in India; “Borderline” tracks a political refugee from El Salvador as she’s smuggled into Canada. Australia shows up frequently. My favorite of her novels, “Oyster,” is the feverish tale of a Jonestown-like cult in an opal-mining town in a remote, inhospitable part of Queensland.

Although she often follows the conventions of modern international conspiracy thrillers, Hospital is as consumed with the cultural past as she is with the topical present. “Due Preparations for the Plague” ricocheted with echoes of Defoe, Camus and Boccaccio as it chronicled the ongoing political and psychological fallout of an imagined 1987 terrorist hijacking. This reconnaissance into the storehouses of artistic tradition and the trenches of fearful contemporary life is even more expertly accomplished in “Orpheus Lost.”

This novel’s underpinning is the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice, in which a musician, uprooted by grief, seeks his dead wife in the underworld, where he softens the hearts of the gods by playing the lyre. The gods allow Eurydice to accompany Orpheus to the living world, but when he looks back to be sure she is following, she slips back into the depths.

Hospital’s interest in the myth is not so much in its literary incarnations -- Ovid, say, or Rilke -- as in its musical influence. The yearning that pulls Orpheus toward the underworld has transfixed composers for centuries, making a particular imprint on opera. At this novel’s heart is Orpheus’ famously haunting lament from Gluck’s 1762 “Orfeo ed Euridice,” the aria called “Che faro senza Euridice,” whose notes waft from a violin in the underworld of the Red Line subway station below Harvard Square at the beginning of a Cambridge springtime. (Many versions of this aria, by Marilyn Horne, Pavarotti and others, are available online through the magic of YouTube, along with an infinitely moving performance of the opera’s “Melodie” by Jascha Heifetz.)

The subway-station violin belongs to Mishka, a Harvard University graduate student who plays the aria obsessively as an elegy for his childhood. He grew up in the Daintree Rainforest in Australia’s northeastern corner, in a fairy-tale house on stilts over a roaring river, amid violent-colored sunsets and flashing green glimpses of wild parakeets. Along with his mother, Mishka’s household included his grandparents, Hungarian refugees who suffered in Auschwitz along with his great-uncle Otto, a violin prodigy. Enigmatic Otto always kept to his upstairs room, announcing himself only through the strains of the Gluck aria, which floated through the paprika-scented house in the evenings.

As Mishka grew older, the silken cords binding him to this magical childhood were unceremoniously cut. He learned that his father, a Lebanese Muslim who’d studied engineering in Sydney and played Persian music on a stringed instrument called the oud, had abandoned Mishka’s mother before his birth and was said to have died soon after in a car accident in Beirut. Sorrowful and angry, young Mishka fled to pursue his education in Brisbane and then at Harvard, where he attempted to bridge his double heritage by mastering both the violin and the oud.

Two chance encounters in Cambridge have fateful consequences for Mishka. In the subway station, he meets Leela Moore, a math student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and they begin an all-consuming love affair. Shortly thereafter, Mishka becomes acquainted with a young Lebanese man who claims to know his paternal family. He tells Mishka that his father is still alive, has renounced music and is now a fanatical trainer of terrorists.

Desperate to find his father, yet terrified to discover what he has become, Mishka flies to Beirut, where he vanishes. Leela, suspecting that he’s been kidnapped by U.S. intelligence experts hoping to extract information about his father, embarks on a doomed, vertiginous, globe-trotting search for her lover. The journey eventually takes her back to her South Carolina past. She discovers that her childhood friend Cobb, the son of a disgraced Vietnam veteran and himself a former Army official turned private security expert, is involved in Mishka’s disappearance.

Adding to the novel’s mood of disorientation is its background murmur of anxiety. Random terrorist acts, large and small, punctuate the narrative: deadly bombings in a Boston subway and the Prudential Tower parking garage; incidents of carnage in Los Angeles and Atlanta; the anti-Semitic harassment of Leela’s faculty advisor. In these panicky times, Hospital suggests, our everyday environment has become an underworld, murky with paranoia and ruled by fear.

Yet there is consolation. For most of these characters, displaced and bewildered by global cataclysms -- the Holocaust, Vietnam, the war on terror -- music evokes both sorrow and happiness. In Mishka’s favorite aria, as his grandfather explains, Orpheus mourns Eurydice but also reconnects with her: “When he sings his grief, he touches her again.” In its own way, Hospital’s novel about music also aspires, like Michael Ondaatje’s “Coming Through Slaughter” or Oscar Hijuelos’ “The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love,” to be music, or at least to mimic the solace it can offer.

Lushly orchestrated, “Orpheus Lost” answers grief and fear with an emotional expressiveness more visceral than words, with the candor of music -- and of myth. *