To play a game of “Dungeons & Dragons,” one needs three books: “The Player’s Handbook,” the “Dungeon Master’s Guide,” and the “Monstrous Compendium,” which lists all of the monsters in the game. It is the “Compendium,” always, that is huddled over by players and never lent out.

Nicholas Christopher taps into this fascination with mythic creatures in “The Bestiary” (Dial Press, 320 pages, $25), his fifth novel. The book details the life of Xeno Atlas, a scholar on a quest to find the legendary Caravan Bestiary, an illustrated account of all of the animals denied entry to Noah’s ark: hippogriffs, manticores, and the like. In this process he must leave home, get through boarding school, endure the Vietnam War, search for clues in Hawaii and Venice, and wrestle with a host of family difficulties.

Mr. Christopher, author of “A Trip to The Stars” (2000), is a gifted prose stylist, with vivid but concise descriptions of the far-off locales that populate the book. And Xeno Atlas (what a name! Mr. Christopher certainly shoots for the stars with that one) grabs the reader from the beginning with his hardscrabble background and proves a serviceable guide through the intricacies of research and scholarship that comprise the search.

The author begins in the Bronx in the 1950s, where his characterizations are most vivid and effective. Streets and playgrounds are sketched with beautiful efficiency. Xeno lives with his grandmother, who introduces him to the spirits of the animal world: the rodents, canines, and bovines that inhabit the scurrilous, vicious, and dim-witted among us. The rumored granddaughter of a Sicilian dryad, Xeno’s grandmother also introduces him to the mythical animals that will drive his quest. (Particularly in vogue is the bear who turns himself into a whale when his mountain becomes an island.)

Attuned to his grandmother’s gifts, Xeno begins seeing griffins, foxes, and panthers around the neighborhood. The real animal, however, is his father. Adorned with a serpent tattoo on his back, he ships off for months at a time as a seaman (“the man who shoveled coal into the furnace”), sending home heartbreakingly terse postcards. As the father fades away, he seems less human and more serpent, a device that peppers the book.

Xeno learns of the Caravan Bestiary in boarding school, where a hip counterculture teacher mentions it in his history class. (Mr. Christopher sometimes falls back on baby boomer clichés such as the Vietnam hallucination and the debaucherous Danish girlfriend.) Set aflame, he begins his quest, and here the author loses some of the brevity and force that makes first act of “The Bestiary” so impressive. Instead of being saddled with debt, a troubling relationship, or a scholarly competitor, Xeno lives off of a monthly allowance (his father has improbably become a wealthy seaman) and studies casually in Venice, Hawaii, and Paris.

As in Mr. Christopher’s other novels, the history provides much of the fun. Looking for the Caravan Bestiary puts Xeno in contact, through rare books, with a host of merchants and raconteurs from the Renaissance. (Xeno finds that the book has been bought, inherited, and fleeced for centuries.) Particularly fascinating are the relayed adventures of Lord Byron, whose stay in Venice topped any baby boomer depravity, and the plague doctors of the Black Death who dressed in bird suits to cure victims, until they perished themselves.

“The Bestiary” raises large questions about our relationship to the animal world. The impulse to genetically engineer, which we typically think of as a modern issue, gets cast in a new light as the reader learns that hybrid animals have occupied us since the beginning of history. Mr. Christopher presents a few great ones in his glossary: the mermecolion, an ant-lion; the bonnacon, a horse with the head of a bull that spits fire. The plight of modern animals is laid out in stark scientific terms by Xeno’s childhood friend Bruno, who tells him that until the 18th century, the Earth’s creatures went extinct at the rate of .25 a year; now, it is 110 a day.

A wry distrust of Christianity and its history-mysteries place “The Bestiary” somewhere in the vicinity of “The Da Vinci Code,” but Mr. Christopher attempts something more difficult with this novel: a feast for the curious that spices its lessons with literary fiction instead of action. Sometimes the synthesis fails, but when it succeeds, as in a beautiful and elegiac meeting of Xeno with a French doyenne who has already concluded her search for the Bestiary, it points to more accomplished books in the future from a novelist who has already demonstrated his gifts.

As the book moves (not races, but moves pleasantly) toward its conclusion, the characters from Xeno’s past reveal their adult and animal natures with equal clarity — one turns out to be a proud peacock, one a hardy she-beaver. Unfortunately, an extraordinarily satisfying wraparound is not fully explored.

In the end, although Xeno’s world traveling and book hunting prove mostly fruitful, his central challenge is to depart from his childhood animal world and face real life. “The Bestiary” ultimately offers a meditation on our need to fight the modern tendency to present our images instead of ourselves.

Mr. Vizzini is the author, most recently, of “It’s Kind of a Funny Story,” and a former columnist for New York Press.