"San Miguel," by T. Coraghessan Boyle Civilization has always had its malcontents: detractors who despise the rat race and the corruption that inevitably accompanies human enterprise. These idealists long to return to a simpler, presumably purer life. In T. Coraghessan Boyle's mesmerizing and elegiac 14th novel, "San Miguel," two utopians from different eras - Will Waters, a veteran of the Civil War, and later, Herbie Lester, a World War I veteran suffering from shell shock - establish their own private idylls on the desolate Channel Islands off the California coast. Both men seek to escape the horrors of their wars, and both, in their egotism and maniacal drive, ignore the desires, needs and safety of the families they bring with them. But the star of the book is the island itself, San Miguel, in all its glorious barrenness, its guano-­coated cliffs and its pounding waves that cough up remnants of the frequent shipwrecks around the rocky shore. A coffin shows up and is converted into a couch, then later is restored to its original purpose. The inhabitants find the island pummeled by sandstorms and shrouded by fogs, only infrequently giving way to rare days when it is the paradise they sought. Boyle's previous novel, "When the Killing's Done," was also set on the Channel Islands. Its harrowing shipwreck scene, reminiscent of Stephen Crane's "Open Boat," was unrelenting in its man-versus-nature drama. That novel dealt with the environmental devastation wrought by decades of human interference on the islands; "San Miguel" re-examines this history from the perspectives of three women. The book opens on New Year's Day 1888 with Marantha Waters arriving on San Miguel with her second husband, Will, and her adopted daughter, Edith. Marantha is consumptive and has just suffered a severe hemorrhage while in Santa Barbara. Boyle's sinuous prose draws us into the awful reality of Marantha's coughing fits as the "blood came in a fine spray, plucked from the fibers of her lungs and pumped full of air as if it were perfume in an atomizer." Will has promised her the climate will be healing. He has also promised they will make a success of the sheep operation he has bought into with the last of her money. Besides the inhospitable weather, Marantha's early clue that she has been misled - or rather totally disregarded - is the shabbiness of their house. Her first impression was of nakedness, naked walls struck with penurious little windows, a yard of windblown sand giving onto an infinite vista of sheep-ravaged scrub that radiated out from it in every direction and not a tree or shrub or scrap of ivy in sight. Fanciful, novel-reading, artistic Edith, who misses her piano and dance lessons and pines for her friends back in San Francisco, compares the island to "Wuthering Heights." Only where's my Heathcliff? Boyle has said in an interview that he is drawn to this period because it was a time when "there were unexplored jungles, unclimbed mountains, the world was much bigger." In the novel, the island is entirely cut off from civilization for weeks or months at a time even though it is only 26 miles from the mainland. Boyle skillfully captures that tension-filled quietude in the pared-down, mundane details of cleaning, cooking, caring for livestock and enduring the tedium of unchanging days. Small events grow in importance - the rescue of a lamb, the leaking of a roof, the preparation of a special lobster dinner, what the novelist Charles Baxter has called "the markers of time moving through stillness." For Boyle, a writer known for his maximalist plots, it is a brave stylistic choice that pays off, allowing the reader a visceral experience of what life was like at the time. After Marantha, Boyle shifts briefly to her daughter's story two years later, when at 16 she's forced to leave her San Francisco boarding school and return to the island. Will puts Edith to work as a servant, in charge of cooking and cleaning for him and the other workers. Her hatred of the island and of him drives her to increasingly desperate efforts at escape. Tatjana Soli's second novel, "The Forgetting Tree," has just been published.