COMPLICATIONS

By Martha Duffy

BRITISH NOVELIST WILLIAM BOYD will never be accused of taking the safe route. His new novel, The Blue Afternoon (Knopf; 373 pages; $23), is for the most part a superior piece of fiction with unusual, mostly immoral characters, plenty of suspense and a truly ghoulish surprise. Unfortunately, that story, set in Manila in 1902, doesn't begin until page 87.

Before that comes a sketch of a youngish architect, Kay Fischer, who is trying to launch a career in Los Angeles in 1936. She meets a man named Salvador Carriscant, who claims to be her father, and eventually she accompanies him to Lisbon, where he promises to substantiate his story. That story is what follows. Why introduce it in such a distracting way? Maybe the author indulged in a little showboating. He is an expert mimic of the Hollywood hardboiled school, typified by Raymond Chandler. Good nostalgic fun, but Boyd shares Chandler's awkwardness in writing from a woman's point of view, so Fischer's observations fall a bit flat.

The main action involves Carriscant's days as a young surgeon working in the Philippines during the war against America. His private war is against the pre-Lister medical practices favored by the local powers. Everybody here is at least slightly crazy and ethically shaky. Carriscant, who throughout the hospital intrigue has behaved estimably, starts an adulterous affair and carries it to a horrifying conclusion.

One suspects that Boyd complicates the plot for the pleasure of disentangling it in lean, lively prose. He also offers fascinating insights into pre-modern medicine and the mad dreams of the earliest aviators-presented not as set pieces but woven into the narrative. In all, typical Boyd-satisfying and baffling at once.