A MYSTERY LIES AT THE heart of William Kwame MacKenzie's childhood years, and he is determined to solve it. And so Audrey Thomas's new novel trundles readers through the red soil of West Africa and the shifting sands of memory as William's trek of discovery labors through past and present.

The fully-fledged male protagonist found in Coming Down from Wa is a rare creation in Thomas's fiction, which usually focuses on female characters and women's perceptions of the world. In fact, on more than one occasion, critics have noted that male characters "do not come out very well" in Thomas land, as they are often presented as selfish, egocentric, narrow-minded, and guilty of great psychological cruelty. One of Thomas's preoccupations as a writer has always been to probe relationships between the sexes, to explore what women see in these flawed men and how they recover from abusive relationships with them by coming to understand their own motives and dependencies.

It's also been a long time since Thomas's fiction wandered so far afield from her current home on British Columbia's Galiano Island: not since such early novels as Mrs. Blood (1970) and the experimental and now little-read Blown

Figures (1974) has her setting been the African continent where compelling beauty and harsh contrasts often shock a naive white visitor. And you cannot find a more naive traveler than William, as the prologue of Coming Down from Wa proves when it presents him as a weeping, sweating, heat-struck "Bronie," wandering through a village market looking for a beautiful young girl who shortchanged him when he mistakenly gave her a Canadian $100 bill in return for six oranges. An art-history student working on his master's degree in the lost-wax process, a batiking technique that has become cheapened and adulterated for the tourist market, William is really researching his parents' past -- which has also been adulterated and ruined by some mysterious catastrophe, some terrible loss of innocence.

In her 1993 novel Graven Images, Thomas presents an anatomy of a family through an adversarial mother-daughter

relationship. In that novel, come to think of it, mothers (like men) don't come off terribly well: the protagonist Charlotte, a typical introspective and witty Thomas heroine, calls her bitter, angry mother "the Aged Pea," and tries to trace the roots of maternal malaise to her family's history in England. William also undertakes such a fact-finding mission, but with far less cleverness. In fact, William's self-absorption becomes a trifle tedious at times, and one wants him to grow up a little more quickly, wishes that the hot Ghana sun would shrivel his petulant self-importance.

Growing up as an only child in restrained Victoria, BC, William is aware that an oppressive secret pervades the house he inhabits with his mother, Pat, a speech therapist, and his father, Sandy, a lab technician. His middle name is "Kwame," Sunday, because that is the day he was born, but playground taunts turn the name into "Commie," making a burden of what was his parents' well-meaning tribute. William knows he is different, scarred by a secret. He sees evidence of the secret's phantom self in the awkward silences between his parents, in their ties, their separate vacations and their failure to share a bedroom. But what is it?

William becomes convinced that the answer lies in the past his parents shared in West Africa, where "William should have been born," and where his idealistic parents were "COW people," volunteers with Canadian Overseas Workers. When William finally discovers what happened to destroy his parents' early joyous love in Wa, in the northern part of Ghana, he confronts truths about human nature, forgiveness, lost opportunity, and himself. Chantal, William's girlfriend, who is a model on a fashion shoot in the Ivory Coast, points out to William that his mission is far from pure: "You are looking for a reason to act cold towards your mother and father, to write them off. Why do you want to do that?"

"You don't understand," William tells her pompously.

William's basic unlikeability as a character is one of the problems readers may have with Coming Down from Wa. Almost all the other characters Thomas creates are far more interesting and sympathetic than he is: his grandfather has a sad kind of wisdom about the family tragedy; Ethnay Owusu-Banahene, a Scottish friend of his grandfather's who marries an African and becomes an "Auntie" to a huge extended family of children and grandchildren, is a fascinating character who deserves the starring role in her own novel; the doomed homosexual, Bernard, whom William meets in a bar, is a complex contradiction with his joie de vivre and his terror of diseases.

But perhaps the African countryside itself is the most compelling presence in Thomas's novel: we see the land and the vibrant scenes in the villages through William's "good eye," which likens many of the hues he sees to the box of 64 Crayola crayons his grandparents sent him when he was six:

As he travelled through this country, he remembered the names of the crayons and began to see things -- the red earth, the fruit and vegetables, the market cloth, the sky, even the flesh of the people -- in those terms: bittersweet,

mahogany, sepia, raw sienna, burnt orange, all the greens and blues and violets, the red of tomatoes and peppers, the yellow flesh of the pineapples, the whole brilliant swirl of it all. He mixed up the water-colors in his little tin and laid

down swatches of color in the watercolor block he had brought with him.

Ironically, the paints do not have the depth or vibrancy to fully capture the cornucopia of colors that William experiences. And until his mother joins him in Wa, William is unable to uncover the family secret. Only then does the power of the mystery take on complete life. As Pat insists on telling her story her way, despite her judgmental son's interruptions, the title of the novel takes on its full force and tragedy. Through Pat's final explanations, the full import of Thomas's political critique becomes clear: the blunders of the well-meaning "Bronies," the mixed motives of the volunteers, the confusion of power and sexuality between the whites and the blacks they would help .... The reader understands, in a way that William may never do, the absolute nature of the betrayal that has pervaded his parents' lives, and the broader significance of that betrayal on a global level.

Coming Down from Wa is a challenging and not wholly satisfying novel. But in it, Thomas charts new terrain for herself and tackles a powerful subject, human cupidity, in a broader political context than ever before. She has dared to expand her own repertoire in writing such a novel, and she is to be highly praised for that. As for William, readers must decide for themselves if he is truly "a thoroughly nice young man," or a symbol of the huge, apparently unsolvable inequity between "rich" nations such as Canada and "poor" ones like Ghana.