Knowledge as Protagonist : LEMPRIERE’S DICTIONARY, <i> By Lawrence Norfolk (Harmony Books: $22; 422 pp.)</i>

A young Jersey scholar, writing at the end of the 18th Century, struggles to complete the dictionary of classical mythology that will one day make him famous. A band of aging pirates floats from ocean to ocean on a mysterious, unidentified ship. A group of malevolent financiers meets secretly in a warren of caverns and tunnels under London, attempting to stave off inquiries into the means by which they came across their ill-gotten gains. . . .

These are only some of the breathtakingly disparate elements that Lawrence Norfolk, a 28-year-old British writer, has woven into the dense fabric of his first novel, “Lempriere’s Dictionary,” a work that has already drawn impressive reviews in its British publication (the London Times called it “an astonishing achievement . . . at once a quest, a tragedy, a political thriller and a cultural meditation”).

Starting with the real-life personage of Lempriere, the man whose dictionary was the precursor of “Bullfinch’s Mythology,” Norfolk moves away from reality and into fiction as his hero sets out to uncover the truth behind his father’s murder. His search will take him from Jersey to London; it will draw him into a web of nefarious doings that will eventually lead him to discover fraud, intrigue and even murder at the heart of the fortunes of that most notorious 18th-Century British institution, the East India Company.

History and fiction merge here; their boundaries mingle and dissolve as Norfolk uses the factual past to depart on a challenging journey of the imagination. Not that Norfolk’s imagination is easy to penetrate. Right from the beginning, he plunges us into a vortex of Greek and Latin references, mythological figures and classical erudition that will intimidate all but the most dauntless of readers. References to Newton’s “Opticks,” the migratory patterns of whales, the draft of ships, the siege of La Rochelle, 18th-Century prostitution, Cardinal Richelieu, Anarcharsis of Scythia (the inventor of anchors) and, above all, Ovid, Ovid, Ovid. Only an Umberto Eco would attempt such a synthesis of fiction and classical reference.

We first begin to sense the degree to which this erudition will pervade the novel when, early on, Lempriere glimpses the woman he will come to love--one who, in a metamorphosis that could be Ovid’s himself, will turn out to be his possible sister as well as the daughter of his father’s killer:

“The carriage wheels came to a slow halt, intruding more subtly into his daydream now, the two merging as John Lempriere watched the image of Aphrodite descended from ether to earth in the guise of Juliette Casterleigh. The sunburnt Cyprian, eyes wide and fishing nets forgotten at the sight of the goddess’s birth, had his counterpart in the young Lempriere. His gaze unreturned, he watched slack-jawed at the vision of Venus Epistrophia in a spume of cream linen placing a delicate foot on the cracked footplate of the Casterleigh carriage.”

It’s a dazzling, not to say exhausting, display of intellectual pyrotechnics, one that immediately reveals not only Lempriere’s classical credentials but also his creator’s. Like Eco, Norfolk revels in the wealth of his knowledge; like Eco, he uses intellect to flesh out and give body to a simple mystery, so that knowledge itself becomes part of the point of the story.

And yet it’s not so much Eco that this novel brings to mind as Dickens. In its sweeping range, its hundreds of scheming, anarchic characters (drunken aristocrats, ancient pirates, prostitutes, solicitors and assassins are just a few), and most of all in its attempt to present London as a living, breathing, vital force of its own, Norfolk constantly reminds us of his master. He needs only mention that hotbed of legal corruption, Chancery Lane, and we think of “Bleak House”; he has but to hint of hidden wealth and we think of “Our Mutual Friend.” Indeed, there are times when his writing seems almost to copy Dickens, for instance when he moves into the present tense to describe Lempriere’s arrival in London:

“Gulls screech and wheel overhead. They can be heard inside the coach as it bumps and slides through the muck and mud, its beloved wheels cutting deep thin ruts in the road which leads on toward London. . . . They pick up and pull on through Southwark to the Borough as the houses gain a story, then another, growing taller and narrower all the way up to London Bridge where the crowded piles break, suddenly, for the river.”

The river. That marvelous, mystical force that runs through so much of Dickens’ work. And yet where, oh where, in this is the resonance that Dickens gives to the river or the rest of the world around it? Where is the sense of real life pulsating around these characters? Where, above all, in Norfolk’s work is the tremendous humanity with which Dickens invests his every word?

Time after time one senses that Norfolk is striving to imitate Dickens (and others, from Eco himself to Lawrence Durrell). But his work, richly plotted as it is, ambitious as it tries to be, ultimately disappoints. At the end of it all, this convoluted, intriguing story seems without point. Characters have no function other than their service to plot; relationships count for little; and the voice of genuine experience, that authentic stamp of the true writer, is almost nonexistent here.

It’s hard to deny the scope of Norfolk’s intellect and his ability to marshall a huge wealth of material into one deftly crafted whole. But as to something more than craft, as to that drop of humanity that makes a novel something other than mere thought, it isn’t here. This is a novel designed to impress, a novel even to intimidate. But a novel of flesh and blood it’s not.