Impressive `Wrack' Digs For Truth -- `Wrack' Digs For Truth

------------------------------- "Wrack" by James Bradley Henry Holt, $25 -------------------------------

The most memorable books tell us, in the context of a gripping story, something greater about what it means to be human. Australian writer James Bradley pulls this off impressively in his first novel, "Wrack."

The book is a meditation on time, truth and loss, in the context of an Australian archeologist who has obtained funding to dig on a deserted beach for the wreck of a Portuguese galleon, which is rumored to have washed ashore in New South Wales in 1519, 200 years before Captain Cook claimed the land for England. Instead, he unearths the mummified corpse of a man shot some 50 years ago, about the time of World War II.

Multilayered meanings begin with the title. "Wrack" usually refers to a shipwreck, but can allude to anything cast up on a seashore. It implies a shattered state. In that sense, it describes the tattered emotions of each of the main characters, as well as the ancient shipwreck.

An old and unreliable map is at the heart of the archeologist's quest. When Bradley ruminates that maps are "not reality, merely facsimiles, stitched together with gathered evidence and made whole by our trust in them," the author speaks as well of our "maps" of reality. "Trust in maps is like trust in love," he writes.

A bitter, burn-scarred hermit who lives in a rusting shack on the beach appears to know something about the shipwreck. But he is fast dying of cancer. In the hope he will divulge his secrets, the archeologist cares for him, calling in a former lover of his own, a nurse, to help.

The dying man's story of his past mirrors the archeologist's confusion, love and obsession. The two men's stories are told in brief, alternating bursts, interleaved with a history of the struggle between Spain and Portugal in the 16th century, when they raced to divide the wealth of the world between them, and treatises on maps reminiscent of Melville's essays on whaling in "Moby Dick."

Most remarkable are Bradley's brief bursts of poetic reflection.

"Beneath the surface there are always secrets, rootlike traceries of veins and capillaries, shifting webs of allegiance and deceit, skeletons wrapped tight in the earth, the labyrinthine motion of water beneath our feet. The heart of a lover. They present a shimmering skin, a meniscus of possibilities, drawn tight between the unseen future, the unknowable past. And in that ghost of a moment we turn around ourselves, sometimes looking, sometimes choosing to believe, but always left with nothing but whispers and suspicions, staring at footprints whose maker we can never know for sure."

Such passages go far to explain why "Wrack" is short-listed for Australia's premier literary honor, the Miles Franklin Award, and for the prestigious Commonwealth Literary Awards. Although this is Bradley's first novel, it is not his first literary recognition. A book of his poetry, "Paper Nautilus," was short-listed for Australia's National Book Council Awards.

"Wrack" is impressively ambitious. Most problematic for readers is the absence of quotation marks or attribution of source in conversation, which frequently leaves confusion about who is the speaker. That seeming ambiguity appears to be part of Bradley's message.

"In the end, nothing is true, save what we feel," he concludes. "Nothing we remember, nothing we believe, all are just stories and echoes. The past is a shifting sea where nothing is certain, and where the things we seek cannot be found, a place where we seek lands that rise from the mist into the glare of the sun and then vanish again, as quickly as they arrived. A shifting sea with nothing at its center, except illusions, and loss."