The Service of Clouds. By Delia Falconer. NY: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1998. 322 pages. $23.

Reviewed by Margaret Black

Australia has just exported another excellent, prizing-winning writer in the person of Delia Falconer. Her first novel, The Service of Clouds, tells a story that takes place in the famous Blue Mountains just west of Sydney, Australia. Into this spectacular setting comes the photographer Harry Kitchings, a mystic who seeks to capture the face of God in pictures he takes of the region's amazing cloud formations. Kitchings literally appears out of thin air over a cliff in front of our astonished young narrator, Eureka Jones, who falls instantly in love with the man, his vision, and photography. The year is 1907, and in the health spa town of Katoomba it was, Eureka notes, "a romantic year. Men carried thermometers and dreamed of women struck by lightning. Postmen hauled packets filled with love and human hair. Women carried notebooks and pressed storms in them like flowers."

Falconer's startlingly precise language attains lyric compression while offering the most fantastical richness. Her writing doesn't cloy because the book is shot through with Eureka's wry humor and her dispassionate commentary on the inhabitants of Katoomba and the curious events which occur there. Her maiden aunts, for instance, with whom the orphaned Eureka lives, are so closely connected that they control each other's breathing. The pharmacist for whom she works is addicted to viewing accidents which have mutilated or disfigured the victims.

For ten years Eureka follows Kitchings, becoming his helper, his informal pupil, and his companion. She scrambles after him up dizzying cliffs, memorizes an entire taxonomy of clouds, and even learns how to catch and develop panoramic visions herself. But despite the expectation of the entire community, Eureka cannot bring Kitchings to a declaration of love. When he marries another woman, Eureka metaphorically plunges back to earth. Bitter and heartsick, she becomes a nurse in the tubercular hospital, where she learns the waterfall sounds of a consumptive's chest and experiences a surprising, near- hallucinatory love.

"It is easier to see clouds than rocks," says Eureka, as she begins her story, "and it requires less effort to describe the grandeur of mountains than the contours of life." An intriguing narrator, Eureka is not always a reliable one. In relating Harry's story, she admits: "I cannot remember how much of this Harry Kitchings told me and how much I have made up. . . . It has occurred to me since that perhaps his whole past was my invention; that I recited these events against his silence over and over in my head until they became real, in order to convince myself that we were close; that he may have worked deliberately at vagueness, keeping himself as distant and insubstantial as a cloud, flinching from my feelings, watching with pity as I tried to give his words a shape. Even now I am unable to bear this thought -- that he may have told me nothing of his life."

Imagined or true, Eureka's version of Harry's background contains a marvelously rendered history of early photography. His daguerreotypist grandfather buys the prostitute he marries "a ring and wrapped her in fine clothes and gently clipped her into his frames, teaching her to emulate the posture of a lady. She bore two sons and a daughter and held that pose until her death." Harry's uncle, whom the grandfather punishes for buying one of the cheap new calotype photographs, experiments with his father's equipment, mixing the nitric, sulphuric, and cyanide gases and painting a solution on his glass plates that "was strong enough to blow off a hand and leave shards inside a heart."

Sometimes Eureka sounds like Huck Finn: "My mother lay with her eyes resolutely closed, a small frown-line between them, as if she concentrated hard on staying dead." At other times she writes with the increasingly fantastic detail that usually comes from Stephen Millhauser's pen: "In the valleys waterfalls stilled into pale tableaus of falling, as if the ancient choreography of stalactites had broken, cold and limy, though the surface of the earth. . . . In parlours the skidding needles of Victrolas scratched figure eights on frozen records. On the roads horses' shins snapped like the frail stems of wineglasses. And sometimes, as the steam from the chimney turned to sleet, a train driver leaned out of his cabin, was struck by snow blindness, and drove his engine off the rails."

I'm delighted that Farrar, Straus and Giroux saw fit to publish this unusual book, and I hope Falconer fulfills its promise in future novels. But it saddens me to realize that much of the truly interesting new literary fiction I've been reading comes from abroad. I suspect that most American publishers would not have given this novel even a second reading, let alone publication, had it come from some unknown American writer.