BOOK REVIEW : Exploring the Depths of Human Solitude : THE ISLAND. Three Tales by Gustaw Herling. Translated by Ronald Strom , Viking $20; 151 pages

The Polish writer Gustaw Herling has lived in Naples for much of the past 50 years, but these three tales take place in an Italy that is medieval in every sense except the chronological.

“The Island,” “The Tower” and “The Second Coming” are harsh eschatological fictions that invoke the bloodshed, tormented miracles, punitive faith and warring doctrines of the Middle Ages. Religion is a scourge with far more damnation in it than salvation, and even the redemptions are ghastly.

Set, respectively, in Italy’s south, north and center, only one of the pieces takes place entirely in the distant past; the other two run up from past to present. But they all breathe the atmosphere of a time before the Enlightenment, as if pestilence, madness, crucifying zealotry, fearful cruelties and blind terrors of the spirit were never overcome, but still churn under layers of modernity.

For Herling, whose Italian refuge followed years in the Polish Resistance and in a Soviet gulag, they do, of course. But his stories make not even a wink of allusion to the present. He does not lower a line to the God-tormented past; he jumps in entirely. His style is dense, elaborate and declamatory with the bronze voice of a gong struck slowly and repeatedly. Repetition--at one point, of a whole page--is an element in his intoning.

Beautiful as it often is, the style is a barrier. Walls may allow a garden to elaborate itself into a kingdom. But it had better be a kingdom by the time we have scraped our knees clambering up to see. In two of the stories, it is.

The island of the title piece is a blistering, arid place, three hours by boat from Naples. Tourists come to visit the Roman ruins and, once a year, to witness the carrying of an ancient Pieta from the Certosa, the old Carthusian monastery, down to the village church. Herling writes an agonizing and finally astonishing story of a 400-year-old feud and a 60-year-old crime that converge at some unnamed present moment to utterly transform the ceremony.

When a plague struck the island in the 17th Century, the monks shut themselves in their precinct and refused to help. In revenge, the islanders tossed hundreds of corpses over the wall until the monks were barricaded by the reeking mountain. Only then did they come out to take the place of the local priests, who had all died.

Later, after the monastery had been closed, and then reopened the now tiny and impoverished monastic community would annually bear the heavy figure of the Virgin and the dead Christ down the mountain, as an act of atonement. As an act of rejection, the townspeople would refuse to assist.

The crime that eventually comes to heal the rift was the rape of a girl by a young priest in the 1930s. Her stone-carver fiance, who was devotedly restoring the monastery walls, tried to kill her as a matter of honor. She blinded him with his own quicklime.

Decades go by, the story is never revealed, the mason, whose memory has been obliterated by the pain, wanders the island like a harmless madman, and the priest decays in his own agony. At the end, he perishes and the mason, who takes on the aspect of a saint, becomes the instrument to bring town and monastery together.

Herling’s characters move slowly and tortuously like figures making their zigzag way through an early Italian painting of a saint’s life. We are oppressed and enthralled by what we do not know. The story comes at us suddenly and retreats inexplicably, much as plagues and invaders and miracles came to medieval villagers. In its midst, the extraordinary figure of the guilty priest stands in a pitiful hell of solitude.

Human solitude, intensified by the approach of death, is the great theme of all three stories. In “The Tower,” it is double. The narrator spends time in a cabin near the Alps, where he finds a 19th-Century account of a visit to a leper who lived shut up in a tower. At the same time, he ruminates on the cabin’s former owner, who secluded himself from his neighbors, annotated the leper story, and came to mirror his fate.

“The Second Coming,” set in the doomsday time of the 13th-Century plagues, when exalted bands of penitents roamed central Italy, is less successful. Its central figure, Pope Urban IV, is another great dying solitary. But the ornateness of Herling’s writing envelops a story that seems emptier, in its barbaric religious drama, than the other two. Mystery is proclaimed into it. In “The Island” and “The Tower,” it flows out.