‘The Photographer’s Wife,’ by Suzanne Joinson

Despite its title, Suzanne Joinson’s dreamlike second novel belongs not to ­Eleanora Rasul, the British wife of an Arab photographer, but to a complex, willful and sometimes off-putting woman named Prudence Ashton. First encountered in 1920 as a lonely 11-year-old trapped in the Holy Land by her father’s government job, Prue is allowed to wander the desert with her own Kodak. There she runs into Willie, the shellshocked aviator her father has hired to survey Jerusalem and help modernize the city — that is, to make it more like London, with tidy public parks and signs of Arab habitation removed.

Joinson, whose first novel, “A Lady ­Cyclist’s Guide to Kashgar,” set her characters wandering through Central Asia, is again concerned with people looking for a guide, a map, some thread to lead them through the maze of their own lives. From one chance meeting come “spirals of confessions” among a large cast of finely drawn characters, all with nicely individual quirks and passions. Most lead to the adult Prue, who becomes an artist living in an English seaside village.

In Jerusalem, both Prue and Willie are fascinated with casually glamorous Eleanora, the great love of Willie’s youth, who scandalized the British expatriate community by marrying her Arab. Willie, of course, wants her for himself, but the Great War has left him with physical and psychological scars that make this very difficult. Prue more simply yearns to be like Eleanora, yet it’s that fierce love that proves most dangerous when her Arab tutor manipulates her into spying on the English, by saying it’s for Eleanora’s sake. Just how risky it is to love Eleanora will become clear after the passing years reveal the true reason for all those maps Prue’s fez-wearing ­father makes of the city, the darker purpose behind Prue’s lessons in code writing and the significance of marginal characters like the man called “Lofty” McLaughlin, who seems too crazy to be a threat.

Prue takes over narrating her own story in 1937, when she’s living with her young son in a derelict railway car parked in the small town of Shoreham. There her work as an artist involves broken statues rescued from Malta, deepening their flaws and boring spiral holes in the soft stone for a London art show. “I would like to make everything secret inside of me public so that there is nothing left in there, festering,” she declares. “That is art.” Prue seems to be a frank narrator, cataloging a trunkful of ragged finery, a fistfighting lover and a body kept bony on tea and toast. She thinks she’s doing well; even her hands have apparently lost their childhood nervous twitch. And then a man from her past reappears, amid rumors of another possible war. Prue realizes she has forgotten some secrets, secrets she and her son will now need to remember.

The novel’s political story line is subtly powerful, but perhaps the greatest reason to keep reading is to find out how the young Prue became this difficult, complicated woman — how she dropped her girlish crush and her camera in order to rework the sort of statues her father planned to destroy. Offhand comments inform us that she has been a model for Surrealist artists and has sneaked into classes at the Slade to learn her craft. She’s indifferent to her philandering ex-husband but adores their son. Though many of the patterns are open to easy interpretation — her father was a cheater, so she marries a cheater — a few of the holes in her story are filled rather late.

Amid some exquisite prose, elaborate and occasionally distracting systems of metaphor add to the novel’s oneiric ­quality, seeming to promise a psychological armature, another code to break. Whether described in the first person or the third, there’s a bird on almost every page, as well as birdlike airplanes and feathered hats. Images of spirals, ­staircases and mazes appear often, as do uneasy references to the passing of time. The images are ubiquitous — but how deeply should we read their meaning?

Perhaps not at all; perhaps we should merely observe. Early on, Willie follows Eleanora into a Jerusalem souk, and it was “like being led into a trap. . . . He was felled, again, by her particular, stalking beauty.” That selfsame sheer beauty stalks the empty spaces of this stubborn, lyrical novel.

THE PHOTOGRAPHER’S WIFE
By Suzanne Joinson
338 pp. Bloomsbury. $26.