Sense of magic and history

PICTURE a tiny village in a remote corner of northwestern Spain: the setting is modern -- workmen listening to their Walkmans, women watching television and gossiping about movie stars -- yet also timeless, even archaic. Imagine an ancient manor house inhabited by a lady with a mysterious past; a somber church filled with colorful murals of beautiful women whom the parishioners assume to be saints, but whom the priest declares to be symbols of the Seven Deadly Sins. It’s a world very close to nature, infused with the sights, sounds, tastes and smells of the countryside -- wildflowers, hay, animals, manure.

This is the village of Aran, brought to us by Manuel Rivas, whose earlier book, “The Carpenter’s Pencil,” won praise for its historical sense of the Spanish Civil War. Although “In the Wilderness,” an extraordinary blend of fable, humor, folk tale, fantasy and romance, is in many ways the furthest thing from a historical novel, it is also marked by a delicate yet real sense of history.

Aran bears shades of its authoritarian Falangist past and the conflict between the Republican loyalists and their clerical enemies. Yet primarily and fundamentally, this is a novel about universal emotions and values: love, fear, sensuality, friendship, wisdom and forgiveness -- classic themes that it somehow manages to imbue with an eye-opening sense of wonder. Although one could compare Rivas’ visionary style to the magic realism of a Gabriel Garcia Marquez or an Angela Carter, his is a style uniquely his own.

Rivas has created an enchanting realm mingling animals and people, all vividly portrayed with empathy, insight and graceful humor. There’s Don Xil, the harsh but genuinely sincere priest, who envies the sentimental faith of his naive parishioners. There’s hard-working peasant housewife Rosa, whom we first meet trying fanatically to get the better of a mouse that simply refuses to be trapped. There’s Misia, the grand lady who tells her fascinating life story to Rosa: her marriages to an innocent, a cynic and a man of wisdom.

There’s Rosa’s harsh husband and her gentle brother, Simon, who seems able to talk only to horses. There are real animals -- a highly intelligent horse (for Simon, of course), a wounded fox whose sufferings are poignantly human. And there are even more interesting beasts of another kind: a crew of especially humble-seeming creatures -- including a mouse, a crow, a mole and a lizard -- who previously were (and in some ways still are) -- human beings. The crow was servant to a legendary king of Galicia; the lizard, a former film producer, of all things; and the mole, a fortune-telling lady named America. And the mouse proves to be none other than the priest Don Xil, transformed now in a way that is spiritual as well as physical.

For in the exquisitely brilliant irony of Rivas’ vision, it’s in their new state as animals that these creatures have managed to become fully human in all the best senses of that word.

They hold intelligent -- and entertaining -- discussions about big topics:

“ ‘What was the first human being’s feelings when they addressed God as God?’ ” the lizard wonders out loud. “ ‘Was it a king at the top of a tall tower or an old man steering a mule? Were they happy or sad? Were they confident or fearful? Did God want to be addressed as God? Was he the one who whispered his name in man’s ear? An interesting word, yes sirree. There have been countless wars and deaths in the name of the merciful God.’ ”

To which the mouse-priest responds: “ ‘I signed some of those sentences .... I did, my friend. I blessed the war between brothers, I railed against the persecuted, I stoked the fire as much as I could.’ ”

“ ‘Wait, America,’ ” he later tells the mole, whom he had formerly roused the mob to persecute as a witch, “Let bygones be bygones. Let’s treat one another as people.’ ”

Born in 1957 in La Coruna, Spain, which he colorfully depicts in this novel as a more cosmopolitan, liberal city than his Aran, Manuel Rivas has chosen to write not in Spanish but in the regional language of Galician -- this Galicia and Galician of northwestern Spain, not to be confused with the Galicia of Eastern Europe. Whether this, part of the vogue for preserving and reviving fading regional languages, may be an unmixed blessing for society as a whole, working in this particular language and tradition has clearly -- and wonderfully -- nourished Rivas’ artistry and imagination. Although few can, alas, enjoy the pleasures of his work in the original, we get a very good sense of its splendors from this beautiful translation by Jonathan Dunne, which manages to be funny, lyrical, sensuous, crisp and -- like a deep-running stream -- clear yet complex.

Merle Rubin is a critic whose reviews have appeared in the Washington Times, Wall Street Journal and Christian Science Monitor.