Books: The Joys of Glass and Gambling OSCAR AND LUCINDA

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Carey's next trick is to bring these two similarly addicted but far-flung young people together. Lucinda journeys to London, where she consults with the designer of the Crystal Palace, the glass-and-iron housing for the famed Exhibition of 1851, about new directions her factory should take. Oscar, meanwhile, successfully out of Oxford and teaching school, has begun to feel that his method of raising money, while not in itself sinful, has inspired unholy passions in his soul. He longs, in short, to bet on everything. So, on the toss of a coin, he decides that he has been chosen to "bring the word of Christ to New South Wales." He and Lucinda take the same ship out to Sydney.

The meeting of these strong-willed, lethal innocents is at first a comedy of errors. She, seeing his clerical garb, feels obliged to ask Oscar to hear her confession, even though that is the last thing she wants. He, shy, seasick, and terrified of the ocean view he knows he must face through her first-class porthole, reluctantly drags himself to his duty. He listens: "She confessed that she had attended rooms in Drury Lane for the purposes of playing fan- tan." He leaps to her, and his, defense: "Our whole faith is a wager, Miss Leplastrier . . . we bet that there is a God. We bet our life on it."

And suppose they are wrong? On the surface, at least, the events that ripple forth from the meeting of Oscar and Lucinda strongly suggest that possibility. Carey slowly, almost imperceptibly, introduces tragedy into his narrative. For all their individual charms, his hero and heroine have a way of both exalting and destroying everything and everyone around them, including each other. And behind their individual fates lies another, equally ambiguous story, which may be either the arrival of civilization in a barbarous land or the destruction of an Edenic world by pompous, ignorant invaders. Like the best fiction, Oscar and Lucinda does not require a choice between its alternative visions. It offers instead an enchanting contradiction, a mirror and a glass, a joyous reflection of how much and how little mere mortals are ever allowed to see.