Ancestor Tales

A San Francisco radio host discovers that he is a descendant of Hawaii's last king.

BIRD OF ANOTHER HEAVEN

By James D. Houston

Knopf. 337 pp. $25.95

James Houston's fascinating historical romance Bird of Another Heaven doesn't soar so much as burrow into the lives of the last king of Hawaii, David Kalakaua; his half-Hawaiian, half-Indian consort, Nani Keala (aka Nancy Callahan); and Dan Brody, Nani Keala's great-grandson. The story is split between the past and present and tied together neatly by the search for a wax cylinder with Kalakaua's last words on it.

The story is told by Dan Brody, a Bay Area radio host who discovers that the name of the father listed on his birth certificate is not the name of the man who raised him. Shortly after this discovery (too shortly), a woman named Rosa Wadell calls in to Dan's radio program, and, true to her role as sage, trickster and grandmother, she teases Dan into a search for his origins. She feeds him reminiscences of and written journals by his great-grandmother, Nani Keala, a fascinatingly chaste hula dancer, teacher, writer, chronicler of time lost and, most important, the sometimes lover of the dashing David Kalakaua.

Dan's present predicament involves his job at an independent radio station threatened by corporate machinations, but we also are introduced to the larger-than-life personalities of David Kalakaua ("The Merrie Monarch"), John A. Sutter (of Sutter's Mill fame) and other frontier characters as well as to traditions of the past -- hula dancing, California exploration, the Gold Rush and life for California Indians at missions and rancherias.

Houston is the author of Snow Mountain Passage, a historical novel about the ill-fated Donner Party, and with his wife, Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston, of Farewell to Manzanar, based on her family's experiences at a Japanese internment camp during World War II. Obviously the result of painstaking and passionate research, the sections here on early California settlement, belle époque San Francisco, Hawaiian court intrigue, the life of mixed-blood Indians in California who experienced the quick and sometimes thorough extermination of age-old cultures are all completely and passionately told.

But facts don't a novel make, imagination does; and this is where Bird of Another Heaven stumbles. The author needs to rise to the fictional challenge precisely when the historical facts peter out. Instead, Houston's novel falls into a great pondering. For instance, just when Nani Keala and the Merrie Monarch are about to have sex for the first time, the story dissolves into a string of questions: "As Nani mounted the steps, what was she thinking, at age nineteen? What was she expecting? We can only guess. Had she asked the horseman where they were going? In this time of high festivity, would she be listening for voices, for the strumming of guitars? When she stepped through the open doorway, did she expect to see the king standing across the wide front room?"

One cannot fault Houston for refusing to sexualize Nani. Hawaiian and Native women have been used to that end for centuries, and it is difficult not to fall into shallow, offensive characterizations based on sexual availability. But Houston's reluctance -- to violate the past, to make his characters sweat -- spills over into the modern parts of his tale, too, and infects the whole of the novel. The book becomes too easy. Struggle yields communion, ancient tribal knowledge produces wisdom, searches unearth treasures, and every need finds its fulfillment. Take this encounter between Dan and his producer, the lovely Julie: "We came straight up to my place and gave ourselves to an exquisite desire. In times past our unions had been wild and bawdy. This was different. This time was new. She had never been so pliant, so generous. We wept. We laughed like children." Indeed.

The novel itself is pliant and generous to a fault, feeding whatever hunger the main characters might have. There is no sense that struggle leads to more struggle or that the characters might at any time be shielded from, even ignorant of, their own motivations or desires. The result is a story that is too tender and pure to be toothsome, filled with modern sentiments and sensitivities rather than those of the actual past. And since none of the characters acts without knowing why, the story stalls, and the only recourse is the chance encounter, the timely coincidence. Just when Dan needs to know more, his saintly grandmother "finds" more journals literally hidden under the bed, or he suddenly remembers a friend who runs a museum in Honolulu.

Houston has given us the story of a lifetime, filled with characters who are posed, not animated. Without an author willing to break the bones of historical fact to extract the marrow, all we are left holding in our hands is a soulfully and sensitively produced diagram of those bones, not a story that contains their true meaning. ·

David Treuer is the author of "The Translation of Dr Apelles, A Love Story" and "Native American Fiction: A User's Manual."