Haunted by her choices

Anne Harrington could have flown home to England after burying her father in Nigeria where he once had been a missionary. Instead, in Jane Rogers' "The Voyage Home," she takes passage on a cargo ship.

After a friend questions her decision to sail: "She couldn't explain to him that she needs to be lonely, she needs to be outside her routine, she needs to find out what she feels. If Father has really gone (of course he's gone, she tells herself furiously. You think he's going to ring and say it's been a mistake?) then what will her life be like?"

She has two distractions from her intended contemplation. One is her father's diary. Her father is just the sort of missionary who gives missionaries a bad name, and his ability to deceive himself is a wonder to behold. For all his religious commitment and kindness after her mother's death, he was not a good man, she realizes.

Anne's other source of distress is a pair of stowaways, a deathly ill pregnant woman and her frightened husband.

Grief and guilt - she'd just broken with her married lover after an abortion when the news came about her father - propel her into the arms of the first mate, with dreadful consequences.

Those consequences haunt her, and Rogers sidesteps the cliched closure the reader expects, as Anne sinks into a confused years-long depression. The novel's themes and elegant writing are reminiscent of Mary Gordon's long-ago debut, "Final Payments," for its character's sorrow and puzzlement and extra doses of guilt. Gordon's story takes a happy turn of sorts. Rogers' story stretches out Anne's misery - she certainly makes painfully clear that people who are depressed can't think straight.

The Rev. Harrington left Nigeria as civil war glued the torn country horribly together again with perhaps 1 million starvation deaths. Teenage Anne was constantly irritated by his unexplained insistence that she eat everything she was served - a habit she now cannot break. Adult Anne is horrified to learn the origin of what seemed like a quirk.

She can forgive him in the end, but the challenge is to forgive herself. The reader will not follow along thinking, Gee, this could be me. Rogers will make you think, instead: Wow, this is just like someone else I know - because much of what Anne excoriates herself for are developments over which she had no control.

You will never see this fault in yourself. But if you criticize yourself most harshly for things that were actually someone else's doing, you don't actually have to face your own failings.

And you can't forgive yourself.

Rogers tells her stringent story in elegiac prose - not an easy balancing trick, but listen: "Estelle's baby she imagined underwater. Yes. Floating and moving in that element, surviving there without air as he had lived in his mother's womb, his movements slow and graceful, his tiny hands raised to his mouth in wonder as coloured fish swam by; he would be upright, like a seahorse, his huge eyes filled with delight. But that was a sop. A dream to comfort herself, like a child sucking her thumb. And even if he was there, down at the sea's bottom, even if he was there or here (are there children's ghosts swimming here, in this thick still air, waiting to attach themselves to living women?), she could never have him. She could never have him because she had caused his death."