The Rope Eater goes out to sea.

The Rope Eater By Ben Jones Doubleday, 272 pages, $24 When the notices start to come out for Ben Jones' debut novel The Rope Eater, you can count on plenty of allusions to Moby Dick and Heart of Darkness. As a seafaring tragedy set in the 1860s, the book inhabits the literature of struggle, in which lives are forged against the forces of nature in a pitiless world. Even though it will surely be placed in the "serious literature" category for 2004, it never takes the risks, or makes the effort, which make great literature great.

The plot hits the ground running. In the first 20 pages, the 17-year-old narrator Brendan Kane flees the rural confines of his parents' New England farm, finds work in a saloon in a drunken port town, signs up for the Union Army during the Civil War, fights in several bloody battles, deserts, drifts back north, gets caught up in anti-draft riots in New York City and finds work on the Narthex, an odd-looking ship leaving port in a few days for an unnamed destination for an undisclosed amount of time. While all that could make a pretty damn good book in itself, Jones picks up and discards any number of themes in this opening salvo: a sensitive young man coming of age, an individual being swept up by history, the dehumanization of institutionalized slaughter and disillusionment with a world spinning out of control. What does young Brendan think of his rapid-fire adventures? Other than being a little shell-shocked by the war, not much. Even after all this, he remains an empty character.

If there is one thing Jones knows how to do, however, it's play to his strengths, and he's a strong lyrical writer. He also has a good enough grasp of 19th-century literary argot (or what passes for such in 2003) and knows how to keep a plot moving. The writing is strong, but it soon becomes apparent that there are holes in the structure of the story you could steer a whaling ship through.

The Narthex is manned by eight sailors, Captain Griffin, the data-obsessed Dr. Architeuthis and the mysterious owner of the ship, Mr. West, who spends most of his time below deck. At various points throughout the novel, there is the hint of a subplot brewing, but Jones either consciously fights it back or never sees it in the first place. The central conflict revolves around the epitome of the 19th-century man of reason, Dr. Architeuthis, (named after a giant squid) and a lumpenproletariat man of action called Rheinhold. Architeuthis spends his time recording wind speeds, ocean currents and taking water samples in his mania to chart and gage and control inconsistencies in the natural world. Rheinhold, by contrast, is a bear of an ex-con more in tune with the natural rhythms of the sea. The two often clash, but Jones is too busy sending Brendan off on clouds of metaphysical reverie to flesh out their characters. What could be a great showdown between theory and praxis is left fluttering in the breeze.

We come to discover that the ship's destination is a mythic tropical paradise hidden in the Arctic, kept warm by an underground lava floe. The evidence? An old travel journal written in jibberish, but which has been translated (I won't say how). At the same time we learn this, another shipmate emerges, and here the story almost takes a welcome turn for the brilliant before settling back into an ordinary adventure story.

There is a three-handed Muslim engine tender named Aziz stashed away below deck, keeping the idle engine stoked. During a storm, Brendan is sent down to help Aziz shovel coal into the engine, and it is there he learns the story of Aziz's childhood in the Middle Eastern desert. In a lengthy aside that smacks of Kafka's fever-dream parables, he describes a village whose only source of income is to deform their children into hideous shapes and sell them to the circus. It's great stuff, but there is precious little of it.

Jones is a fan of big, rollicking metaphors. Icebergs in particular provide plenty of space for him to swing for the fences: "[T]he mighty bergs, extending into the deeper and more secret depths, move through the pack like great souls through the world?obedient to their own deep currents, which are invisible to those of us who battle and fracture our way on the surface." Or, a little later, "some icebergs lose their deep hold, fracture, and skitter over the surface, wind-driven and lost." Right. We get it?icebergs, like men's souls, are deep, mysterious things. Jones is guilty of the same sloppy literalism when Brendan helps Architeuthis plot currents and wind speeds, launching on extended and equally mundane riffs.

All this might make it sound like The Rope Eater is a horrible book, which it's not. As a straight adventure story, it's very entertaining. But Jones makes fits in so many directions that he abandons, and leaves so much unsaid while he's busy trying to say so much, that any larger points get lost along the way, like a ship at sea.