PIT OF DESPAIR

By John Skow

A bad historical novel is buffoonery -- Tony Curtis capering in Taras Bulba -- but a good one makes the hair rise on the back of the neck. Poison [Random House; 317 pages; $23], by Kathryn Harrison, is very good and a complete surprise. Harrison's last novel, Exposure, was six months ahead of contemporary; it followed a tough, shrewd Manhattan beauty as she came unstrung from the effects of drugs and childhood abuse. The new novel maroons the reader, without cedit card or taxi money, in a terrifying place and time: Spain at the end of the 17th century, in the pit of the Inquisition.

The author follows the separate torments of two women caught in their society's septic lunacy. Francisca is the daughter of a failed silkworm grower. She falls in love at 19 with a priest, is betrayed to the Holy Office and is routinely and grotesquely tortured. Marie Louise is a French princess and hostage to power politics, renamed Maria Lusia and married at 19 to Spain's King Carlos, a trembling invalid kept alive into adulthood by the milk of wet nurses. Since Maria's role is to provide a male heir to the throne, and since Carlos can't achieve intercourse, she is subjected to increasingly bizarre nostrums for the barrenness that must be her fault. As Francisca wastes in her dungeon, Maria is poisoned (by her pious mother-in-law) and drifts toward death in eddies of laudanum.

There is a structural awkwardness in Harrison's parallel tales; their lines never converge. The two doomed women never meet. This may not matter; what Harrison writes about with chilling force is women and men trapped in societal malignancy. Her language is restrained and sure. Maria, she writes, learned in Spain "what an old woman knows, that there is no present in which to take pleasure. That minutes are as two piles of coins: those spent, and those about to be spent. There is no other currency." This is good writing and powerful imagining.