BOOK REVIEW : EVER AFTER<i> by Graham Swift</i> ; Alfred A. Knopf $21; 275 pages : Cerebral ‘Ever After’ Is Obvious, Jarring

Graham Swift’s “Ever After” sets a contemporary life in apposition with a life from Victorian times and uses the resonance between them to conjure up a cloud of literary suggestiveness.

The parallel with A. S. Byatt’s “Possession” is inescapable. There, two scholars, rivals at first and then lovers, find a cache of writings that document a previously unknown love affair between two celebrated 19th-Century poets.

In Swift’s novel, a morally and intellectually tormented Cambridge or Oxford don--which is not specified--discovers a journal that brings out the moral and intellectual torment of his great-great-grandfather.

Byatt’s book, though something of an intellectual game, was lively and well-fleshed; in their convergences and differences, her two sets of literary lovers are engagingly real. Swift has not gone much beyond his schema.

Bill Unwin, the don, discourses upon his dilemmas: a Hamlet-like guilt over the circumstances of his father’s death and anguish over his wife’s. Matthew Pearce, the ancestor, records his: a crisis of faith over Charles Darwin’s discoveries.

Matthew Pearce is the son of a free-thinking watchmaker and a religious mother. He tries to keep his faith; he marries a parson’s daughter and attends church faithfully. When Matthew visits his father’s shop, Swift nicely suggests the shift of belief that was taking place at the time.

The father seemed to be manufacturing “this vital stuff called time, this stuff which Matthew still thought of as being essentially human in meaning, the companion and guardian of human affairs.”

But Matthew was carrying a seed of doubt. Years before, he had stumbled upon an ichthyosaurus skull. “It was the moment of my unbelief,” he writes in his journal. “The beginning of my make-believe.”

The seed sprouts only when his baby son dies. As long as God was just, it didn’t matter so much whether He existed; now, Matthew announces himself as a Darwin disciple. He breaks with his devout wife and his father-in-law--a kindly ditherer and avid beekeeper--sails for America and is drowned en route.

To Bill Unwin, a dilettante and something of an academic fraud--his university post was in effect paid for by his stepfather, an American plastics manufacturer--the journal is a revelation. A man, he marvels, can give up all the attachments and comforts of a life to follow an idea.

Unwin has never followed an idea as far as the corner. His life has been a jumble of notions arrogantly expounded and entirely without practical effect. Abandoning a youthful vocation as a poet and scholar, he drifted into becoming manager for his actress wife.

He loved her devotedly--one of the few clear and affecting things about him--but never summoned up the conviction to interfere with the obsessive smoking that would have killed her had she not, finding herself with lung cancer, killed herself first.

Unwin’s main irresolution, which dominates the book, oscillates around the suicide of his father, a government official. It was caused, he had always believed, by the affair between his mother and the man who would become his stepfather. Hamlet-like, he lives miserably with the idea without acting on it.

As time passes, his muddle is thickened by the possibility, first, that his father’s death was really caused by scruples over his role in Britain’s nuclear weapons program and, second, that he may not have been his father after all. Finally, the discovery of the journal does precipitate action, of a sort: a failed suicide attempt.

None of this really works. Unwin’s speculations are interminable and consciously mannered. And Swift, author of the brilliant “Waterland,” keeps dosing his theme by working in a whole series of Hamlet quotations.

It is grindingly obvious and texturally jarring. It is also more than a little absurd. Unwin as Hamlet will not do. It is hard to conceive a Hamlet whose father may have died of a heart attack instead of Claudius’ ear ministrations and whose real father, perhaps, was Polonius.

“Ever After” is almost entirely cerebral, and that would be fine. But it is more cerebral than intelligent. Unwin’s groping, though voiced in a semblance of donnish wit and paradox, is not genuinely interesting.

When he breaks through to speak openly of his passions underneath, it is hard to credit them. They lack urgency; they are the pretext for a philosophical puzzle rather than the engenderer of one. Pearce, glimpsed more sketchily, seems a little more real.

Next: Elaine Kendall reviews “The Way Men Act” by Elinor Lipman (Pocket).