THE CIRCUS OF THE EARTH AND THE AIR, by Brooke Stevens, Harcourt, Brace & Co., 435 pages, $23.95.

When Orpheus, the son of Apollo and Calliope who brought music to the ancient Greeks, fell in love with Eurydice, a tree nymph, the gods rejoiced.

But one day, while fleeing the unwanted advances of another, Eurydice was bitten by a snake and died. Orpheus grieved and all the music stopped as he searched the world over for his lost love. Legend has it that Orpheus descended into Hades to bring Eurydice back to life, only to lose her again forever when he looked back to be sure she was following. The depth of Orpheus’ love and determination to regain Eurydice resonates in the story of Alex and Iris in Brook Stevens’ first novel, “The Circus of the Earth and The Air.”

This surrealistic novel centers on the big ring of the circus, giving it a truth, an archetypal significance that mystically surpasses the harsh reality of mere performance, mere story. The reader follows Alex in his circuitous search for his wife, Iris, who literally vanishes while volunteering in a circus magic act.

His journey begins and ends in a small town in New Hampshire, a setting which firmly grounds it in everyday existence, while also reflecting the miraculous illusion that is the circus. And the suffering and emptiness which Alex feels when Iris disappears are palpable.

Alex says the circus made him feel like he was in a place he had never been in before, just as his love affair with Iris made him feel as if he were descending into a “dangerous position of having (his) life placed wholly in somebody else’s arms.” Yet despite the risk that all lovers take, Alex fully expects to be allowed to grow old with Iris; her vanishing devastates him. Once an orphan who had been deserted by those who should have shielded him from the modern world, Alex now must experience again that sense of loss, of betrayal.

In his heart-wrenching search for Iris, Alex faces ridicule and disbelief, violence and torture, temptation and remorse. He trains to be a clown and a high-wire artist, and is indoctrinated into a cultlike religion.

During his search for his wife, Alex’s dream life seems to take over as some of the secrets concerning his own identity and Iris begin to filter into his awareness.

The author admits that his protagonist is much like himself and that, like Alex, when Stevens worked for the circus in his youth, his dream life became more entrancing, almost more real, than his true existence. The watery, wavy, ever-changing world of the circus further confuses and mesmerizes Alex so that he begins to doubt his sanity. This tension makes this book exciting, suspenseful, scary and often funny.

The bizarre and confusing revelations that emerge in the course of Alex’s adventures add a depth and color that would be missing without Stevens’ adept control and balance of his characters, visions and symbols. This new novelist achieves an element of verisimilitude by scattering throughout the text prints of photographs of real circus performers, playbills and tickets. Yet Stevens is careful to establish and maintain the center of the work’s consciousness from Alex’s perspective, so that our perception of reality is as fluid and confused as his own.

It is the circus itself, with its alternative realities, which emerges as a major character as the author carefully orchestrates Alex’s journey of self-discovery to illustrate the mesmerizing, mythic qualities of the big top. Thus, like Alex, the reader questions whether there is such a thing as reality, for the fascinating, illusory, symbolic world of the circus is, like first love, so much more enthralling, more adventurous, more true to all that is the best in us.

This is a heartbreaking story of “true love” which is, like the circus on which it focuses, a matter more of belief than of fact. This one is worth the journey, worth the risk.

Linda L. Labin is an associate professor of English at Husson College.