THE MAGICIAN’S WIFE.<i> By Brian Moore</i> .<i> William Abrahams/Dutton: 232 pp., $23.95</i>

The magician’s wife is Emmeline Lambert, the daughter of a provincial doctor and a kind of Emma Bovary without any of Emma’s daydreams or pretensions. Placid, timorous and recessive, her spirit is dulled by domestic routine. Her husband, Henri, a famous stage prestidigitator and inventor of illusion machines, is the very reverse: bold, ambitious, self-confident and self-centered. The routine of the household is monitored by his 42 clocks and punctuated by electric carillons of his contrivance. Very little of this routine has been organized to give her pleasure.

The date is 1857, in the Second Empire of Napoleon III, who duly makes an appearance in the novel, as in life, as a kind of mountebank himself, with his half-closed eyes, waxed mustaches and constant cigarettes. The settings move between the imperial court at Compiegne and the French garrison in Algiers, where the final imperial conquest of North Africa is being prepared. Through the flattering attention of the emperor and the guile of a colonel of intelligence named Deniau, Lambert is recruited to go with his wife to Algiers to perform such feats of legerdemain as will overshadow the triumphs of a holy man who has been preaching a holy war of liberation against the French.

The subject, then, is magic or, rather, two kinds of magic: the European magic of craft, machinery and manual dexterity and the Islamic magic of faith and prophecy, embodied in the divinely inspired (or so he touchingly believes) Bou-Aziz. But, in fact, there is a third magician, Brian Moore himself, whose copious gifts as a contriver of fictions resemble those of a conjurer and whose faith in the powers of fiction resembles Bou-Aziz’s confidence in the ways of Allah.

The story he tells here, shaped with characteristic elegance, displays many of these gifts: among them his ability to present setting, tone and atmosphere with a swift simplicity of language. Here Deniau, a role crying for the oily suavity of an actor like the late Adolphe Menjou, begins his flirtation with Emmeline by bringing her to the ruined fortress of Pierrefonds, adjoining the forest at Compiegne:

“And so, waving aside the servant who waited to conduct them, they passed through a dark vaulted chapel, climbing more than a hundred steps to reach a platform which overlooked a view of the little town and the surrounding forest. A cold wind blew through the ramparts as they stood, side by side, looking down. She shivered and turned away. Seeing this, he took off his fur-lined cape and draped it about her shoulders. It was a gesture any gentleman might have made, but when he did it he did not release the cape, instead holding it against her body for a long moment. ‘I can see that you were made for warmer climes,’ he said. ‘You need the sun, you need the space, you need the desert. The desert has a beauty one can’t imagine until one sees it. You must visit Africa.’ ”

The tone, of course, is a mocking yet affectionate version of the language and sentiments of 19th century romantic fiction, but it is a tone against which the developing novel is played. In a way, the book resembles a street-magician’s game of three-card monte. Lambert, preoccupied with his professional skills and his hunger for fame, has been neglectful of his wife. And Emmeline, neglected but still sweet-tempered, her rouge and mascara long since set aside, seems as destined for seduction as was Emma Bovary. Deniau seems stage-perfect for the role of seducer, assiduous and attentive both in France and beneath the hot sun of Algiers. But when Moore lifts the card, it is not the one we expected. Once Lambert has served his political purpose, Deniau drops his pursuit of Emmeline. And she, for her part, has come to a clear sense of Deniau as a manipulative schemer. More extraordinary than this, she has developed an emotional resolve and a capacity to act with boldness and certainty.

“The Magician’s Wife” is accomplished and adroit, a fable sustained by Moore with a practiced and confident balance. In nothing is he more the true novelist--a vanishing breed--than in his respect for plot and for narrative swiftness. One of the pleasures for the reader derives from the pleasure Moore clearly takes in his narrative dexterity. It is a novel played in a different and lighter key than other recent Moore novels. Different, let us say, from “The Statement,” one of his ventures into Graham Greene country, a story using the techniques of the thriller to carry a fugitive based loosely on Klaus Barbie through the treacherous French underground of church reactionaries and pro-Nazis. “The Magician’s Wife” is told from a greater distance and is set, deliberately, in a lighter, more ironic key. The books might almost be the work of different writers. And from almost the first, this has been true of Moore’s novels: They seem like 20 novels by 20 novelists. The center of his talent lies somewhere close to this extraordinary and unsettling inventiveness.

Midway in his career, in 1975, Moore published “The Great Victorian Collection,” in which a young professor falls asleep in a Carmel motel and wakes to discover that he has dreamed into existence, in a large parking lot, a vast assemblage of Victorian rooms and artifacts: “silver tea sets, bridal breakfast services, ornamental urns, statuary, cheval glasses, tallboys, ottomans, pouts, corner cupboards, gaming tables, stoves, kitchen utensils, fireguards and firedogs.” And among the many rooms: a music hall and the parlor of a famous brothel. Closer inspection reveals, cunningly concealed, cabinets and alcoves of specialized erotica and erotic equipment. People can walk through the rooms, try on the costumes, handle and authenticate the artifacts, even photograph them. But with each photograph taken, the objects lose a little luster, their fullness of being fades a little.

This magically evoked Victorian world is Moore’s playful, ultimately somber consideration of the relationship between a novelist and those entities, generated within his imagination, which have been given their provisional and enigmatic existence in the external world. The nature of that existence, a kind of three-dimensional mirage that readers can handle, is the central mystery of art.

By the time of that novel, Moore was well established as an immensely talented novelist, playful or serious as the occasion demanded. Two of his early works, “The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne” and “The Luck of Ginger Coffey,” displayed among other virtues an impressive ability to relate private drama to cultural setting--in one case his native Belfast and in the other the Canada to which he had emigrated. In another, “I Am Mary Dunne,” the woman telling the story, who has four names because she has been married three times, has trouble keeping firm the outlines of her self. But Moore’s chief pleasure here, and the reader’s, comes not from theme but from his risk-taking experiment with the voice of a sexually experienced woman. In the course of such experiments in narrative, he disclosed or discovered an ability to write of sexual conduct directly and with great vividness. It is a talent which he was to develop in, for example, “The Doctor’s Wife,” and it is rather as though he had chanced upon one of the erotic cubicles in the Victorian collection. In this, but still more in his fascination with the craft of creation itself, “The Great Victorian Collection” is eerily prescient.

The novels of Brian Moore are unexpected, idiosyncratic, each filled with its own energy, colors, scents. The writer whom in some ways he resembles is Greene, who called him “my favorite living novelist. Each book of his is unpredictable, dangerous and amusing. He treats the novel as a tamer treats a wild beast.” (Greene too was unpredictable, but there was nevertheless a recognizable Greene-land, a familiar territory of voices, moods, scenes.) Each of Moore’s novels launches itself afresh upon an exercise in fable-making, confident in the powers of fable to sustain the writer on his tightrope and to entertain, perhaps to dazzle, the reader. It is difficult, as Anita Brookner has written, to think of another writer these days who is “taking risks of such unfashionable magnitude.”

One need not be a novelist, like Greene or Brookner, to recognize those risks; they are present in the feel and sound of Moore’s novels, their swift sleights of hand. Like Henri Lambert, although neither of them would welcome the comparison, Moore is a magician.