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Beside Still Waters, by Barry Callaghan, McArthur & Company, 316 pages, $29.95

Two portentous enigmas lie at the heart of Beside Still Waters , a powerful and uncompromising love story by renowned writer Barry Callaghan.

The first, signalled in the epigraph, is “we are all our ages at once.”

The other comes from one of the novel's characters, a Catholic priest who compares life to an algebra equation, the solution to which is 2 = 1: “What's absolutely not true is proven to be true, and until you understand how to find out where the mistake is, and live with it, you understand nothing.”

Beside Still Waters tells the story of photojournalist Adam Waters and his quest to find the woman, a dancer named Gabrielle O'Leary, whom he has loved since childhood and who has disappeared twice from his life.

The first time was about a decade earlier in their hometown of Toronto, when at the age of 19 she fled to New York after her mother committed suicide.

The second is in Puerto Rico, where, nine years later, they meet by accident in a casino. She is in the company of a mysterious gambler named Mio. They resume their love affair, but after a few glorious days, she steals away early one morning while he sleeps.

As Adam journeys toward a leper colony deep in the bush of war-ravaged Gabon, where he has tracked her down, his encounters with a veritable bazaar of characters – from a Bavarian oom-pa-pa band to the lunatic colonel in motley fatigues who waxes poetic on the technology of war and the merits of the crossbow – become increasingly risk-fraught, setting the stage for a deadly showdown. Allusions to Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness are not subtle.

Adam's relentless quest is counterpointed by his memories of growing up Catholic in Toronto, the reunion with Gabrielle in Puerto Rico and his experiences as a photojournalist in the Middle East. As past and present shuffle and reshuffle in Adam's consciousness, like a pack of cards, a bittersweet story emerges of innocence lost and regained, of grief and reconciliation.

Beside Still Waters is a breathtaking novel. Callaghan's prose is pure poetry in the way in which gestures (e.g., “V”) and objects, animate and inanimate (e.g., birds, balloons), accrete meanings and transubstantiate, in how detritus or the discarded (e.g., shoes) becomes integral to the fictional constellation. It is exuberantly erotic in its depiction of sexuality's joy.

Yet the novel is also deeply disturbing in the violence that piles up and in which one becomes implicated, in its exploration of the evil that can penetrate and compose a life. And it is fearless in broaching such hard moral issues as the brutalization of children.

The writing is humane. With a tiny detail, in one well-crafted scene (he is a master short-story writer, after all), Callaghan offers a window onto the souls of the wounded, damaged, even slightly deranged characters: Adam's oft-abandoned, alcoholic mother, who talks to angels, lights little matchbook fires and teaches him about stars and crosses; the enigmatic Mio, a Jew who was a hidden child during the war; Gabrielle's odd-duck father, the church choirmaster with a Verdi fixation; the lepers, who demand of Adam that he take their picture, that he “see them, how they are.”

Relationships are rendered with grace. In a tender father-son reunion scene, the wandering jazzman Sweet Web Waters hands the now-adult Adam his teddy bear, giving him back his childhood. It counterpoints that of a father denying his daughter the chance to be a girl, except in those fleeting moments with her childhood sweetheart. One of the most poignant is Adam's strong bond of friendship with Father Zale, who is the novel's soul and whose philosophizing isn't quelled even after he is shot through the throat with an arrow. (Contrast his perceptive counsel with the messianic chatter of the leper colony's soulless crank of a priest.)

These lives are “populated by ghosts.” And with this leitmotif, Callaghan displays his tonal range, from the emotionally searing to the playfully rueful (the epitaphs on tombstones in the Waters family burial ground that crop up, ditty-like, throughout the novel). During a visit to the cemetery, Web, presciently, enjoins Adam to acknowledge his dead kin, for they are part of him too. Acceptance of the dead's claim on the living can be freeing, as it is for Adam, or entrapping, as it is for Gabrielle.

Adam's journey to the leper colony is also a moral progress, during which he learns that facile judgments are inevitably deficient. He learns that to really “see” someone, one must understand what that person has been through, and that an authentic relationship demands that one be true to oneself and to accept the other's truth.

Similarly, Callaghan's insistence against facile resolutions of the happily-ever-after makes this impossible love story so satisfying. I won't give away the ending, when Adam and Gabrielle decide their future. Or the series of climactic revelations (one of which gives the novel its title) that makes the ending an inevitability, and the conclusion, with its dark twist, a stark reminder that the child will ever claim its right to nest at the self's core.

As Adam comes to realize, 2 = 1 was more about “life as it got lived because the equation contained, hidden in its own logic, its own impossibility, a negation even as it remained an affirmation, because all equations by their nature had to be an affirmation.”

Diana Kuprel, a Toronto-based editor, is also the translator of Zofia Na{lstrok}kowska's Medallions and co-translator of Ryszard Kapuscinski's I Wrote Stone.