Impersonating His Father Imitating a Missionary : ISARA A Voyage Around Essay <i> by Wole Soyinka (Random House: $18.95; 272 pp.; 0-394-54077-8</i> )

It is a difficult and humbling experience to write a review about a writer one admires enormously. For me, Wole Soyinka is such a writer. A Yoruba from western Nigeria, Soyinka is a playwright, novelist and poet, a man who astonishes his readers with the power of his unique and exhilarating vision. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1986.

Perhaps I should explain my bias from the start: My admiration for Soyinka is personal. We were both part of that immense upheaval in African life which is loosely termed colonialism. He was a headmaster’s son in a Christian grammar school; I was the daughter of a British District officer. Sadly, we would not have taken tea together, though, had we been the same age, we might have been allowed to play together as small children for a short time, before being made to go our separate ways.

Soyinka’s way is described in an exquisite memoir called “Ake, the Years of Childhood.” If you missed it when it came out a few years ago, you must get it immediately for it is quite wonderful. In “Ake,” Soyinka describes the first 11 years of his life as a questioning and precocious little boy growing up in the idyllic world of the parsonage and peering over its walls at the sprawling town below. Ake itself is a place of delicious smells and sounds: roasting coconuts, steaming peppery stews, yams, fried pork and locust beans--the flavors of oil-steeped food wafting through markets presided over by women singing praise chants.

Here, Yoruba customs and beliefs lived side by side with the stiff teachings of Christian missionaries determined to silence the thunder of the pagan myths and rituals. Soyinka managed to take what he needed from both these religions, perfecting an even-handed communion with two cultures. It was perhaps a natural accomplishment in a place where some of his childhood companions were considered abiku (those who could move between the realms of the living and the dead with disarming ingenuity). Such children could chat to spirits in the woods and share vast pots of crayfish stew with invisible but noisy guests.

But Soyinka’s father, the austere and argumentative headmaster (known as HM or Essay), brooked no religious ambiguity, and his mother, an exuberant and volatile woman, quickly adopted an enthusiastic faith in both Bible and cane.

Soyinka explains that the memories that rose up during the writing of “Ake” deepened his desire to recover yet more of a vanishing existence, both his own and that of his homeland. And yet, instead of going on with his autobiography, he chose to take the more profound step of returning to his father’s life, as if, in order to understand himself more fully, he must first examine the lives of his ancestors. His new book, “Isara: A Voyage Around Essay,” is the result of that prodigal journey, one made particularly poignant by his father’s death during Soyinka’s political exile.

However, after finishing “Isara,” one wonders why Soyinka needed to make this journey at all: Essay is so present in the first book that no further recovery seems necessary. Perhaps the intention of the new book is to recapture the life and time of his father rather than the man himself. Or, perhaps “Isara” should be read as an attempt to answer the eternal riddle: Who am I and where do I come from? The strange thing is that when we leave the vivid life of “Ake,” everything changes: The headmaster’s son vanishes and he seems to take the magic of his father with him when he goes.

It is almost as if Soyinka is trying to achieve what he longed for as a small boy--to become his father. In “Isara,” he dons the persona of his father as he is leaving his home to travel, on that marvelous beast the railway train, to a seminary where he will study to be a teacher. Here, at St. Simeon’s, Essay partakes of a strong dose of Western education, administered by ferocious Scottish missionaries intent on fostering in their pupils a love of the Empire and the mother tongue. They succeed almost too well. Essay and his friends, who call themselves The Circle, are intoxicated by the seductive alien speech, savoring words and ideas, hoarding thoughts for further discussion with the small coterie of like minds. It becomes the habit of a lifetime, carried on in correspondence after they separate and leave the seminary. As the wider world is revealed to them, they argue about Mussolini and anticipate the arrival of Hitler; order books from Foyles in London, and dispute the merits of European medicine over tribal cures.

These Nigerian teachers, trying to establish themselves in a colonial era, surrounded by the larger and livelier African world, are faithfully re-created by the author. But the book suffers from its very fidelity: The select little circle from the seminary begins to sound pompous and pedantic; they hug their alien intellectual culture so closely that it stifles. The constant elevation of language makes one long for a simple sentence. The physical world, which inspires Soyinka’s true genius, fades out of sight.

James Baldwin once expressed his difficulty with the English language this way: “It was not my own because I had never attempted to use it, had only learned to imitate it.” “Isara” sometimes sounds like imitation and one wonders if, by assuming his father’s personality and profession, Soyinka has not lost his own voice. It is only at the end of the book--when Essay returns to Isara to take up his traditional rituals and sacred duties once more--that Soyinka’s writing resumes its awesome and mysterious power. Here he is no longer his father but himself: a writer who has challenged and reinvented the language of the former master to bear the full weight of his own experience.