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When inhumanity foments more of the same

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Special to The Times

Retribution is as risky as snake-charming. In returning pain for pain, we may set the world to rights, or only compound whatever evil we’ve suffered by taking on the worst traits of our antagonists. The challenge for a novelist is keeping the reader’s sympathy for an injured character who becomes, in his longed-for revenge, as venomous an agent of destruction as those who have hurt him.

Richard Zimler’s “Guardian of the Dawn” is a tale of the Inquisition in India, of the cruelties and fanaticism of the Portuguese invaders who settled in the city of Goa and surrounding territory in the 16th century. Along with their laws and religion, the Portuguese imported their famed interrogation methods to subdue the native peoples as well as any Jews, lapsed converts or troublemakers who fell under their jurisdiction. The church sowed fear and reaped confessions, submission and the property of the condemned.

Tiago Zarco has ended up on the wrong side of the Palace of Inquisition walls. The son of a Jewish manuscript illuminator whose own parents had fled the forced conversions in Lisbon and settled in Constantinople, he can’t figure out what crimes he is suspected of committing. His father was tortured in this same prison, and chose to kill himself -- with Tiago’s reluctant help -- rather than reveal the names of Catholic converts who were still secretly practicing Judaism.

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Tiago’s father had been invited to India to work for the Sultan of Bijapur, had bought a farm near a village about a day’s ride from Goa and married a Hindu girl who died young. She had converted to Judaism for him, and they become one of perhaps 20 or 30 Jewish families in the region. But Goa itself was under Portuguese rule, and the practice of any religion but Catholicism was forbidden. Tiago’s merchant uncle converted so that he could establish his business there. He married a haughty Portuguese woman and adopted an Arab orphan named Wadi who became Tiago’s close friend and suitor of Tiago’s sister.

Over the months of his confinement in Goa, Tiago obsessively picks apart the fabric of his childhood. Who betrayed his father to the Inquisition? Who betrayed him? When a Jain snake-dancer is dumped into the cell, his feet coated with coconut oil and cooked like meat by his interrogators, Tiago’s descent into madness is halted by pity. But the further torture of his kind and uncomprehending new friend who has never heard of Christianity but been condemned for sorcery sparks a rage in Tiago that lasts through the book’s brutal closing chapters.

Spared the stake but exiled to prison in Lisbon, Tiago reflects that his father would have wanted him to “ennoble himself” through labor and through contact with the other prisoners: “but instead, I hoarded my bitterness and rage like a youthful Midas, lying on my back on my cot and holding them up to the light so that I could see their shape and luster, polishing them when alone, always impressed by their purposeful radiance.”

There are two novels in “Guardian of the Dawn” -- the lush, emotionally expansive first two-thirds of the book, which alternates between prison scenes and Tiago’s recollections of his country childhood (his delight in his Hindu neighbors, his taste for chapatis with palm sugar), and then the Elizabethan revenge tragedy of the final third, with its cut-and-thrust prose and dire fulfillments. Readers who have been wincing at the bigoted and sadistic Inquisitors won’t be surprised at how quickly Tiago’s retaliation escalates, like a kitchen fire that reaches the wood supply. As Tiago’s Hindu cook would say, invoking the goddess of destruction, “Kali will have her day.”

It may have wounded Zimler to sacrifice goodness in a character brought so painstakingly to life. Until his prison term begins, Tiago is a gentle and empathetic young man, as appreciative of the Hindu monkey god and mischief-maker, Hanuman, as of his own stories and traditions. The weakness in this otherwise engrossing novel is that the author seeds the narrative with misery from its first pages. In so heavily foreshadowing Tiago’s fall, he heightens suspense but sacrifices hope.

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Regina Marler is the editor of “Queer Beats: How the Beats Turned America On to Sex.”

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