When souls are lost and found in exile and faith

The Secret River
By Kate Grenville
Canongate, 334 pp., $24

Napoleon’s Exile
By Patrick Rambaud
Grove, 329 pp., $24

The Heretic: A Novel of the Inquisition
By Miguel Delibes
Overlook, 350 pp., $25.95

``The past is another country; they do things differently there." This quote used to appear in practically every literary quiz, guaranteed to fool most contestants who invariably attributed it to ``Brideshead Revisited" (``I have been here before. . .") or to some other Masterpiece Theatre chestnut. It is (you're right) the first line of L. P. Hartley's ``The Go-Between," one of the best depictions of ruined childhood innocence from one of England's most underrated writers.

In her new novel, ``The Secret River," Australian writer Kate Grenville ups the ante by first transporting us to the other country of late 18th-century London and then exiling us to the penal colony of New South Wales, where even the earth and sky do things differently. ``Through the doorway of the hut he could feel the night, huge and damp, flowing in and bringing with it the sounds of its own life: tickings and creakings, small private rustlings, and beyond that the soughing of the forest, mile after mile."

William Thornhill, transported to New South Wales for the term of his natural life in 1806 with his wife and children, looks up at `` a thin moon and a scatter of stars as meaningless as spilt rice. There was no Pole Star, a friend to guide him on the Thames, no Bear that he had known all his life: only this blaze, unreadable, indifferent." An aboriginal man steps out of the darkness, raises his spear, echoes Thornhill's panicked cry of ``Be off," and disappears.

The stage is set for a confrontation that seems inevitable but never predestined. Grenville is too sly a writer for that. Imperceptibly heightening the suspense, she draws you into Thornhill's London past, then into his struggle to carve a homestead out of an astonishing land that warps reality, tilting perception toward hallucination. ``Somewhere ahead of him in the top of a tree, a bird made a measured sound, again and again, a little bell being struck. A fish launched itself out of the water and through the air in a flash of silver muscle. The place held its breath, watching." While his wife yearns for London, `` its exact shape gone fluid" in her recollection, Thornhill and the few other pardoned convicts who have staked claims on isolated clearings are increasingly aware of the elusive aborigines surrounding them. ``Their bodies flickered among the trees, as if the darkness of the men were an extension of bark, of leaf-shade, of the play of light on a water-stained rock."

Grenville's admirably plain novel is equally subtle in its portrait of what a man is and what -- to his own horror -- he can become.

Napoleon Bonaparte, a greater criminal than any transported convict, received a far gentler exile, initially on Elba, where the last novel in Patrick Rambaud's trilogy depicts the egomaniacal yet still cunning dictator ruling ``a tiny island, which smelled of rosemary -- but which was really a cage."

Rambaud's final installment (``The Battle" and ``The Retreat" were both superb) begins in 1814 with the Allied capture of Paris and ends with Napoleon's escape from Elba and return to France. Waterloo is absent, which is a pity not only because Rambaud's battle scenes are so good but also because without it ``Napoleon's Exile" is thin. Denied action, the characters languish and the plot marks time, something the Little Corporal would never have tolerated.

There is no such dallying in Miguel Delibes' s ``The Heretic: A Novel of the Inquisition." This gripping yet contemplative dramatiz ation of one man's life and of religious upheaval in 16th-century Spain follows a wealthy merchant, Cipriano Salcedo, from birth to death and from obedience to heresy as Luther's Reformation penetrates Spain and the Catholic Church responds with its bloodthirsty Inquisition. ``There were punishments and there were punishments," Cipriano learns. ``The criminal condemned to death shouldn't be confused with a relapsed or reconciled criminal. The first and last were usually turned over to the secular arm to be hung before their bodies were delivered to the flames. Relapses, recidivists, or the merely obstinate were . . . burned alive at the stake."

The Inquisition is, however, only part of the picture. Delibes is less interested in its sadistic practices than he is in the city of Valladolid during the 1560s; how it looked and smelled, conducted its religious festivals, harvested its crops, endured plague, treated its prostitutes, buried its dead. No detail escapes his attention yet none is there for its own sake. Everything serves the story, simple and masterfully told, of Cipriano's ill-starred entry into a world that will repeatedly cheat him of the love he craves and undermine the Catholic teachings he has accepted since childhood.

Introduced to Luther's writings by a dissident theologian, Cipriano finds his spiritual serenity restored even as his marriage curdles and his body weakens. The contrast between the hero's spiritual quest and his corporeal trials is comic but never vulgar, emphasizing above all the fragility and mystery of human longing. With immense erudition and a light touch, Delibes reminds us that fiction can depict faith without turning into ``The Da Vinci Code" or the ``Left Behind" series.

Anna Mundow, a freelance journalist living in Central Massachusetts, is a correspondent for the Irish Times. She can be reached via e-mail at ama1668@hotmail.com.