In war-torn Russia, a meeting of fanatical minds

The People’s Act of Love, By James Meek, Canongate, 394 pp., $24

In 1919, two young men meet in a forest. One, Balashov, a member of a mystical religious sect, is walking home to the Siberian village of Yazyk, about an hour away. The other young man, Samarin, has clearly been in this remote forest for a long time. He does not know there is a village only an hour away. He does not know the country is at war -- or still at war. He seems totally disoriented.

They have no reason to trust each other. Nevertheless, they are alone together, hiking toward Yazyk, and naturally they exchange information. Samarin explains that he's been a prisoner far to the north, in a Siberian camp called the White Garden, and was taken along when another prisoner escaped: a human monster known as the Mohican.

''And yet he took you with him when he escaped," Balashov, the religious one, points out. Samarin is amused: ''He took me with him intending to slaughter, butcher and eat me, like a pig. . . . What could be better than food that walks alongside you, carries your goods, and keeps you company until the day you eat it?"

Samarin escaped, but he warns Balashov that the Mohican is following him and is certain to arrive in Yazyk sooner or later.

Balashov tells Samarin that even though World War I is over, Yazyk is occupied by a Czech brigade commanded by a man named Matula, who's become power-mad. Matula seems either unwilling or unable to go home, and meanwhile he is keeping his soldiers, and in some ways the entire town, hostage.

''The old war didn't end cleanly," Balashov explains. ''There were remnants everywhere in Russia, leftovers, like the Czechs. Russia took them prisoner in the old war, when they didn't have a country of their own. Now they do, and they're trying to get back to it, but they've got caught up in this new war. . . . There are thousands of them all over Siberia. They've taken over the whole of the Trans-Siberian railway, can you imagine? None of it makes any sense."

So there are no trains anymore, and that is why Balashov is walking to Yazyk after doing an errand for his neighbor Anna Petrovna, a widow with a young son.

They're lying, both of them -- not about everything, but certainly about the personal information. And of course they're both mad, violently mad, in different ways that amount to two sides of the same coin. Samarin is a political fanatic; Balashov is a religious fanatic. Both believe in violence as a cure for what ails the world.

Both men in James Meek's novel ''The People's Act of Love" hold completely contradictory ideas without a murmur of conflict. In Samarin, the two ideas are the Communist manifesto, the axiom that ''the will of the people" must ascend to power, along with the equally absolute conviction that any inhumane or even disgusting act perpetrated on those same people -- theft, lying, betrayal, murder, even cannibalism -- will justify that end. In Balashov, the conflicting beliefs are that a benevolent God loves us and is with us constantly, and that to deserve God's love it is necessary to mutilate the bodies we were born with -- to amputate and throw into a bonfire our own sex organs.

Even Anna, who has exiled herself to Siberia for reasons she won't divulge, is insane. But not irrevocably. Anna is also beautiful and wise enough to excite the lust and love of many of the men in town. Mutz, a Czech lieutenant, is in love with her, as is Balashov, and Samarin perhaps soon will be. And those attributes also make her powerful enough to force these men to understand that their behavior has been insane.

Meek's writing is so calm and graceful that it is possible to read about stomach-turning events almost as if the story were a fairy tale -- long, long ago, and far away, and thus unthreatening. His descriptions of the harsh, unforgiving landscape are gorgeous. His characters are complex and all too recognizable as human.

If there is a flaw in the novel, it is that some of the characters' actions remain inexplicable, in a way that Tolstoy or Dostoevski would not have tolerated. But to say that Meek is not Tolstoy or Dostoevski is faint criticism indeed.