But Fukunaga and screenwriter Moira Buffini (a prominent British playwright who also wrote the script for Stephen Frears’ undervalued “Tamara Drewe”) have grasped that cinema is not television, and that just because a famous book contains a lot of words, you don’t need to fill up the movie with them. When ramrod-straight governess Jane Eyre (Mia Wasikowska) and her moody employer, Edward Fairfax Rochester (Michael Fassbender), do speak, the lines are rich and resonant with the idiosyncrasy of 19th-century English speech. I haven’t gone back to check, but I’m pretty sure Buffini is pulling lines straight out of Brontë. (The terrific cast also includes Judi Dench as Mrs. Fairfax, the housekeeper, and Jamie Bell as St. John Rivers, the young clergyman who takes Jane in after she flees from Rochester.)

More important, we get the impression that days pass at Thornfield Hall, Rochester’s estate in the remote north of England, with little or no conversation at all. And the wide, wild, ferocious landscapes captured by cinematographer Adriano Goldman vividly convey the idea that these damp, freezing moorlands — where Charlotte Brontë and her sisters would all die before age 40 — cling to the outer edges of British civilization, almost as far from the center of empire as Africa or India. In a sense, the setting makes Rochester’s behavior more comprehensible (and if you seriously need a spoiler warning for a novel published in 1847, here it is). Jane’s haggard master, played by Fassbender as a crumpled, sarcastic and fundamentally defeated man, manages to convince himself that out here in the wilds of Yorkshire, society’s laws do not apply — or at least not to him.

Adapting a Victorian classic definitely isn’t the obvious choice for Fukunaga, a California native of half-Japanese ancestry whose acclaimed debut, “Sin Nombre,” was a violent indie thriller, made entirely in Spanish and mostly shot in Mexico. But maybe it was time for “Jane Eyre” to be set free from an overdose of Englishness, and on the evidence so far, we’re talking about a young director with a tremendous gift for cinema and almost limitless range. Either way, this retelling is vivid, alive and loaded with a doomed passionate intensity that feels very Brontë-esque. Arguably Fassbender and Wasikowska are both too good-looking for these roles; Jane is meant to be a plain, Quakerish girl and Rochester to be brooding and ugly. About the best way I can explain it is that both are such physical actors, and so committed to these characters, that their prettiness never gets in the way.

Buffini’s script dispenses with Jane’s tormented-orphan childhood by way of a short introductory scene, which may displease some Brontë buffs but gets us more quickly to Thornfield, where Jane first encounters Rochester in the misty, wild woods as a half-demonic figure, as shaggy as the stallion he rides. He terrifies her with his masculine, erotic energy — but it is Jane who stands her ground while Rochester comes away injured, which pretty well summarizes their entire relationship. In the first conversation between Jane and Rochester, Fassbender strikes the right note of irony and cruelty, but his posture gives him away. He sinks down in the chair, as if crushed by his secret, while Wasikowska’s Jane sails straight at him like the figurehead of a ship, bewildered by him (and attracted to him) but refusing to act intimidated.

I’ve seen enough of Fassbender in demanding movies like “Fish Tank” and “Hunger” to know that he could play a terrific Rochester, but Mia Wasikowska’s performance as the ultimate Gothic-novel heroine should propel this remarkable 21-year-old Australian to another level entirely. In my recent conversation with Fassbender, he compared Wasikowska to a young Meryl Streep, and now I see it. Jane must be alternately ferocious and vulnerable, modest in manner yet enormous in spirit, and utterly unwilling to compromise her moral code. She has to embody all the story’s contradictory themes — the idea, for instance, that women are the stronger sex, and strongest of all because their destinies are limited and they must so often be subservient — without ever saying so, and Wasikowska does this in almost miraculous fashion.

“Jane Eyre” is something like the ur-text of chick lit (along with “Pride and Prejudice”), but Fukunaga and Buffini see clearly that Brontë never presents romantic love as painless or happy endings as effortless. Jane slices through Thornfield Hall like a razor, exposing all its secrets and exposing herself to shame and ridicule, because she loves Rochester. Because he loves her back, Rochester reveals himself as a criminal and a hypocrite, hiding a secret in the attic that, in this version, seems all too real while remaining one of the most potent symbols in all of literature. “Jane Eyre” is a passionate, impossible love story, one of the most romantic ever told. But it’s also a cold, wild story about destruction, madness and loss, and this movie captures its divided spirit like none before.

Compared to entirely too many actors, Fassbender — the son of a German father and Irish mother, he was born in Heidelberg but grew up in Ireland — comes off as damn near a Renaissance man. He doesn’t engage in pretentious acting-school speak or irrelevant political diatribes, and gives off no hint of the ultra-manly, screw-you moodiness affected by so many prominent male actors. (Don’t make me name names!) Hardly anyone can talk coherently about what acting is or how to do it well, but he’s one of the few to admit it. When I ask him how he deals with the ordeal of a “press day,” when he must face a parade of journalists who all ask him about the same questions, he says, “To be honest, I don’t enjoy it all that much, because I don’t know how to talk about what I do. People say things to me, like, ‘I loved what you did with that role, how you did this and then this and then this!’ And the only thing I can say is, ‘Well, great.’ But the fact of it is that I don’t really know what I do.”

Fassbender says that the directors of his films have picked him, rather than the other way around. But he certainly seems to have pursued projects with the discriminating eye of a cinephile, working with leading-edge British filmmakers Steve McQueen (“Hunger”) and Andrea Arnold (“Fish Tank”) before moving on to Tarantino and Fukunaga, whose previous film was the terrific cross-border thriller “Sin Nombre.” Later this year we’ll see him as Carl Jung in David Cronenberg’s “A Dangerous Method” (opposite Viggo Mortensen as Sigmund Freud), and he’s started work on a new film with McQueen. Even Fassbender’s more popcorn-flavored roles, like playing Magneto in the upcoming “X-Men: First Class” or starring in British cult director Neil Marshall’s ultraviolent “Centurion,” feel like well-informed strategic digressions. As for his villain role opposite Josh Brolin in the disastrous comic-book western “Jonah Hex,” which he quite accurately describes as “the Lucky Charms leprechaun mixed with Frank Gorshin’s Riddler,” let’s just give him that one. No doubt it seemed like a good idea at the time.

“Pretty awful, was it?” asks Fassbender when I mention “Jonah Hex.” “I haven’t seen it myself.” Then again, he hasn’t seen Fukunaga and screenwriter Moira Buffini’s startling take on “Jane Eyre” yet either, with Mia Wasikowska as the eponymous governess who slices open Rochester’s home and heart, and reveals his secrets. I’ll get to “Jane Eyre” in a day or two, but just ignore the haters. This is a lean and invigorating reinvention of an oft-recounted classic, light on talk and heavy on landscape and atmosphere, that captures more of the cold, wild heart of Charlotte Brontë’s novel than any version I can recall. Arguably, of course, both stars are too good-looking for their parts; Jane is supposed to be plain and Rochester forbidding and ugly. But Fassbender plays the tormented lord as a man being eaten away by a secret; if he isn’t ugly, he’s definitely in considerable pain.

You have just said you don’t know how to describe what you do, but I’ll ask you to give it a try anyway. Somebody gives you a script. How do you approach it?

What I do is I just keep reading and keep reading and try to understand it, make it as real to me as possible, and try to find truth in whatever it is. I know it sounds so naff. I try to find some truth in whatever it is that I’m doing and then just go for it, dive into it. In terms of, like, having an articulate way of explaining it, I don’t know how to do that.

As far as people asking me questions about it, it is what it is. I totally get it. It’s just that my answers mightn’t make any sense. That’s what I’m realizing about this thing that I just did. [A round-table interview with a group of journalists.] I’ll say something and I’ll be thinking, “What the fuck did that just mean? What does that mean?”

You have the reputation of being a real cinema buff. You were doing TV and then you had a small part in “300.” And then suddenly you’re making films with François Ozon ["Angel"] and Steve McQueen and Andrea Arnold and Tarantino and Neil Marshall and now Cary Fukunaga and David Cronenberg. You really can’t claim that isn’t deliberate.

Yeah, and that’s what’s always been my goal. I’ve been unbelievably blessed and lucky to be allowed to be in this position. I mean, I haven’t picked them, they’ve picked me, which is amazing. When I started off doing this, all the films I enjoyed were by major filmmakers. You know, all the usual suspects: Scorsese, Coppola, Sidney Lumet. To be allowed to express myself with the very best of people looking after me, it’s — I do feel like I’m dreaming a lot of the time.

What are you doing right now? Is the Cronenberg film about Freud and Jung completely finished?

Yeah, I wrapped the Cronenberg film last summer, I just finished shooting “X-Men” and now I’m starting Steve McQueen’s new film [provisionally titled "Shame"]. We’re a week into it now, and we just had a night shoot last night, here in New York. It’s full-on.

So you knew about Cary Fukunaga, right? Who is obviously quite young, but is suddenly hot stuff after “Sin Nombre.” Had you seen it?

I had, yeah. It was one of my favorite films of that year, and I was fascinated to see what he would do with Jane Eyre, this classic British stalwart piece. What I noticed about “Sin Nombre” is that real sensitivity to human beings and relationships, to how we deal with each other. Obviously that’s massive in “Jane Eyre,” it’s so complex and so layered. I thought he was the man for it, anyway.

So many actors have played Rochester over the years, from Orson Welles to Charlton Heston to, I don’t know, Timothy Dalton. Did you watch any of them do it?

I figured, you know, that I’d be the first to really get a take on it. No! Just kidding! I watched all of them, really, or as many as I could get my hands on, from Orson Welles through Toby Stephens [in the acclaimed 2006 British miniseries]. I liked Toby Stephens the best, actually, out of all of those I’ve seen.

Orson Welles really hams it up in that role, as I recall.

Wow! [Stentorian Orson Welles voice.] “Jane! Jaa-aane! Jaa-aaa-aane!” Whoa! Slow down! At one point I was also involved in “Wuthering Heights,” actually. And I watched Laurence Olivier’s Heathcliff. And again, I was like: Whoa, shit! OK, Olivier was great, and Orson Welles — they are who they are. But, shit, this has dated, I gotta say.

I really liked this version of “Jane Eyre” a lot. But the other side of that is that it has a lot of unexpected and raw qualities, and some people will really hate it.

Which is good, you know. It’s always better to have people that love it or hate it. The worst thing is indifference, you know. If you’re stuck in the middle you may have made a bad film. Maybe that’s unfair — anyone who manages to get a film made in the first place, that’s a real achievement.

As you play Rochester, he almost seems diseased. He’s got a secret, obviously. Do we have to warn people about spoilers for a story written 160 years ago? [Laughter.] But it’s like he’s a drug addict, or he has cancer and hasn’t told anyone. Something’s eating him inside.

Great, great. That’s what I was trying to get at. That’s what I wanted with him, he’s got a shadow on him all the time, this guilty secret, this dirty secret. Everything springs from that secret, from what happened to him in Jamaica. His whole life has been formed from that. You can imagine this guy who sets out for Jamaica when he’s young, full of hope, has his whole life ahead of him, and it all goes really wrong. Fifteen or 20 years later, you can see that he’s somebody who hasn’t opened up to anyone. He has no friends in his life. People come around, but he’s a bit odd, you know — Rochester who travels all the time, who’s trying to escape from reality.

He doesn’t want to fall in love again, because it destroyed him so much that first time around. So when Jane comes along, not only is he attracted to her, but he’s also scared of her. She starts peeling things away from him, and that’s what I was trying to work on. Hopefully those elements are exposed.

And here’s another thing. When I read it I thought to myself: God, he’s quite bipolar. He goes through the ranges, and it can be in one scene. He’s gone from seemingly contented and at ease to disgruntled and melancholic and dark. That was the first thing that struck me when I read it, and I thought: Cool, that’s interesting.

Have you read the novel? And did you like it?

Yeah. I mean, my mother and sister are big fans. It’s that thing: Women seem to like that torture — the love that they cannot have! You know what I mean? It’s still happening now with “Twilight.” The Brontë sisters live on in the “Twilight” franchise — it’s that same thing, the love that you’ll never be able to have, even if they’re madly in love. They can never be with each other! Why? Why? Why can’t they just …?

So, you know, I never got into it when I was a teenager. But in later years when they were doing [Jean Rhys' "Jane Eyre" prequel] “Wide Sargasso Sea” as a two-part series on TV, I read both books, “Jane Eyre” and “Wide Sargasso Sea.” That was about six years ago, and then obviously I reread it recently when this came along. I’m very interested to see what my sister and my mother think of this — they haven’t seen it yet!

Maybe we can make allowances for the movies, but it’s tough to sell Mia Wasikowska, who is so striking, as Jane Eyre, the governess nobody except Rochester even notices.

Yeah, that’s the thing. The original plain Jane. But Mia’s got this great ability to be very striking or just blend into the background. We were doing a photo shoot the other day, and she arrives in her woolly hat and ordinary clothes, just being Mia. Then she puts on these clothes and strikes these poses that just command your attention. Her physical control is amazing, her command of her physicality. That comes from being a dancer, and also the discipline, the way she approaches her work, that bleeds through from her dance training. It’s cool, man — it was a real pleasure working with her, and I really think she’s got that Meryl Streep quality, she’s of the same ilk. She really has something.

I don’t want to go all theoretical on you, but one of the great things in this movie is the dynamic between you. There’s almost this weird gender reversal, where what you like about her is that she’s the tough one …

And I’m like an old frantic woman! [Laughter.] I’m like some neurotic woman running around my house, feeding the woman in the attic! Yeah, it’s true, and that’s what’s great about it, especially for the time it was written. The idea that you have this woman who’s taking on this guy, the master of the house. She strikes a chord there with men and women — men like strong women, you know? That’s why I think it still resonates today. “Wuthering Heights” is the same way. Cathy is so spirited, you know? Not to be messed with. And Heathcliff is the counterpart of that.

And since we’re talking about Rochester’s big secret, I thought the movie handles her really well. The madwoman in the attic has all this psychological or symbolic resonance, if you like, but she also has to be real.

Well, that’s it. That’s the thing: She’s actually physically there, and she’s also metaphorically there. I feel sorry for her, man! Think about Victorian England — she might just have been horny! She might have just been a randy woman, and they were like: “You must have the devil in you! You’re crazy!” No wonder she wants to burn the house down, she’s locked up in that fuckin’ room all the time! I don’t blame her. It’s like the Chekhov play where the dead person is the central character. It’s almost like she’s the central character in this story. She’s the cause of everything. She is forcing Rochester to draw out of his history. She almost becomes Thornfield House.

You were talking about Mia’s carriage, and her dance training. When I think about your relative positions in the film, your postures — you’re slumped down in the chair, despondent, depressed, cynical. She’s upright, optimistic, with an edge. She comes at you like a knife and slices everything open.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. She’s like a razor blade. She’s going to cut the whole house open. “Things are going to change around here!” She doesn’t say it, but she doesn’t have to. And then the other side of the equation was working with Judi Dench. I just thought: I can’t believe I have the opportunity to work with her. That was just so amazing. And I’ve got to be so mean to her, too! But she’s so cool. She has apparently forgiven me.

You shot the film in the Peak District, very close to the actual setting of the novel, and I feel like Cary and his cinematographer caught something of the primitive, almost wild character of that place. It doesn’t feel coddled or pretty. It’s not Victorian, at least not in the comfortable, garden-party sense.

Exactly. I wanted Rochester to be out there digging in the dirt, digging up the garden. One of Rochester’s more appealing qualities is that the class system disgusts him. When he has Lady Ingram and those people around, he doesn’t like any of those people. He has to entertain and go through the motions, but he’s somebody who works with the earth, who goes out hunting. It’s not the old caricature [sipping tea and humming a Baroque melody]. There was a dirt to it. People didn’t have showers, so there was dirt on their hands. As you just said, there’s something very primal about it. Beneath the elegance and the repression, the beast was not very far underneath. These guys were just as decadent as anybody today; they were doing all kinds of crazy shit. Rochester has been to brothels, has dabbled in drugs, or at least that’s what I think.

Our time is up, but tell me something about playing Carl Jung in the Cronenberg film. I totally can’t wait to see that.

Again, there was so much to learn and not enough time to appreciate exactly who he was. It was a fascinating experience to delve into that world, and a lot of the Jungian technique can translate to the acting world. You know, the various personality types — extrovert and introvert — there’s a lot of language that I would have learned in acting school, and now I realize it came from Jungian beliefs. And it was amazing to work with David Cronenberg and Viggo, and Keira Knightley — she’s going to make people sit up and pay attention with her performance. I think she’s really stunning in it. And Viggo Mortensen — he is the most beautiful man in the world! He is! He’s just like, wow! He’s such a special dude. And Cronenberg is so funny, and obviously brilliant. That was a special experience.

In explaining this curious formulation, Faulks acknowledges Jane’s “resilience” and “moral calibre” but qualifies this praise by claiming that “her happiness, and her psychological ‘completion,’ seem to depend on her securing the love and companionship of another, Mr Rochester.” This need, he maintains, is incompatible with heroism.

By contrast, Becky Sharp — a conscience-free climber and high-society con artist — may be widely viewed as the anti-heroine of “Vanity Fair,” but Faulks believes that her “resourcefulness and skill,” combined with her refusal to regard her “feelings for a man as a fixed point or priority,” add up to a form of heroism. That’s because, in Faulks’ view, “pairing off is not the goal or completion of the heroic trajectory. The hero imprints his or her qualities on society and by doing so overcomes false or smothering social restrictions.”

This definition of heroism is very far from “obvious,” let alone universally held, but let’s set that aside for the moment and consider Faulks’ (mis)characterization of Jane. It’s especially worth doing in light of the new film version of “Jane Eyre” set to be released in early March, and the likelihood that it will, like other adaptations, treat the book as a simple love story.

The belief that Charlotte Brontë’s novel is in essence a romance, with Jane’s marriage to Rochester serving as her character’s “completion,” is certainly a common one. One reason for this error is that “Jane Eyre” is one of the key inspirational texts for an entire genre of fiction, the romance novel, in which the marriage of heroine to hero is the primary purpose of the narrative. But “Jane Eyre,” despite its fictional legacy, is not a romance novel.

The pivotal moment in “Jane Eyre” is not the one in which the Byronic Mr. Rochester professes his love for the “poor, obscure, plain and little” governess and asks her to marry him. Rather, that moment comes after Jane learns that she can’t wed the man she loves because he is already married (to a madwoman, whose existence he has concealed from her). Rochester attempts to keep Jane by suggesting they run away to France together, but she refuses. She flees his house and, without family or other protectors, the penniless young woman is soon reduced to beggary, grateful to eat scraps originally intended for pigs.

This episode is only one of a series — including the chapters devoted to Jane’s childhood amid unloving relatives, her years in a harsh boarding school, and the weeks when, having been rescued by a family of a devout Calvinists, she contemplates life without Rochester — that describe not Jane’s quest for love but her assertion of her autonomy in a world that regards her as entitled to none. In the past, Jane rebelled against authority figures to defend the legitimacy of her feelings, but when she leaves Rochester, it is her own desires that she defies, this time on behalf of her principles.

It’s often difficult for modern readers to grasp the importance of Jane’s resolve because our moral code has shifted. We might, for example, regard it as a greater evil to abandon true love than to violate a marriage as empty as Rochester’s. But Jane believes to her core that what Rochester proposes to her is wrong (also, that it will ultimately damage his respect for her), and even if we can’t necessarily agree with that, this is what matters in the context of Brontë’s novel.

What modern readers are also prone to miss is that Jane sacrifices not only her heart’s desire, but also, for all she knows, her life. A woman of her class, without family, money or wealthy friends, had few ways of making a living besides governessing (an option lost to her without references) or prostitution (which, even if Jane would have considered it, was itself merely a drawn-out death sentence), especially in the pre-industrial English countryside. Within days Jane has begun to starve. Though the Rivers family saves her, she has no reason to expect or even hope for that salvation.

For Jane, the “fixed point and priority” of her life is not “her feelings for a man,” but the self-determination expressed in her ability to choose her own truth over those feelings and even, if necessary, over life itself. Her abandonment of Rochester is her coming of age. It’s hard to see how such a personality, and the drama of that personality reaching this apex of despair, clarity and fortitude, could be seen as un-heroic, especially compared to the adventures of a sociopath like Becky Sharp.

Faulks admires Becky because she is “magnificently indifferent” to romantic love and because there’s no sign that her “emotional life is such that it would influence her worldly actions.” She uses and manipulates people in the “lifelong survival game” of mid-Victorian social life. She’s certainly a terrific character, but how this constitutes imprinting her “qualities” on society or overcoming “false or smothering social restrictions” isn’t clear. Becky simply plays that game by the real (rather than the stated) rules, and does better or worse depending on her skill and luck at any given turn.

“Vanity Fair” is a satire set on a large stage, and “Jane Eyre” is a brooding Gothic bildungsroman with a much tighter focus (as well as a first-person narrator), but the world Brontë depicted is arguably as brutal as Thackeray’s. Nevertheless, it is Jane who succeeds at transcending social restrictions by steadfastly insisting on the inviolable dignity of even someone so “insignificant” as herself. The fact that she does it in a smaller context (the only context available to her) doesn’t make this any less of a victory.

Of course, Jane does get her man in the end, as every reader of Brontë’s novel hopes she will. Marrying Mr. Rochester makes her happy. Why shouldn’t it? Faulks claims that “a hero can be disappointed or defeated in love and it will not matter, because pairing off is not the goal or completion of the heroic trajectory.” But this amounts to saying that love (as Jane obtains it, on her own terms) shouldn’t matter that much, that it is a less worthy goal than wealth and influence, which is what Becky is after.

For Faulks, placing emotional connections at the center of one’s life is a form of “surrender” that female protagonists — with the exception of the wicked yet thrilling Becky — too often make. Only by triumphing over others, by treating them as instruments of her will, does Becky transcend this fatal (presumably feminine) weakness and show the “independence” of a true hero. Perhaps it’s no surprise, then, that Faulks was chosen to write the continuing adventures of a less amoral but equally self-contained protagonist, James Bond — a man, it must be noted, who does not have a single friend. He can call that heroism if he likes, but I can think of better words.

Further Reading:

Sebastian Faulks on Becky Sharp and Jane Eyre in the Telegraph

I confess to having once suffered from this boys-only syndrome. Raised on a steady diet of Hardy, Dostoevski and Faulkner; enamored of the macho antics of Hemingway, Kerouac and Mailer, I spent my school days and early adulthood believing that the creation of serious literature was primarily a male endeavor. Women’s writing was the stuff of discussion groups and beach fantasies; men’s writing dealt with the big themes like existential angst and stoical heroicism. Of course, women were capable of writing beautifully and memorably, but there was always a suspicion that they were like Danica Patrick taking the lead at Indianapolis or Hillary Clinton getting ready to run for president — women making a name for themselves in a man’s world.

In other words, I was an idiot. My reeducation began a dozen years ago, when I was asked to take part in a radio presentation on Edith Wharton, a writer I’d previously assumed responsible for the “Little House on the Prairie” series. “The Custom of the Country” hooked me with its mercilessly elegant prose and mordant social satire. Four novels later I was devoted to a writer I now consider every bit as good as Henry James and far better than Sinclair Lewis or Theodore Dreiser. I understood the error of my ways. Since then, I’ve labored to make up for my earlier sins, recently deciding, for instance, to read “Mrs. Dalloway” instead of going back to “Crime and Punishment” for the sixth time. It is a slow, occasionally frustrating process, but I am a better man for it.

So when I was asked to take part in this series, I took it as a golden opportunity to further my remedial studies. After a brief consultation with my wife, Caryl (whose father was born and bred in Yorkshire), I decided to tackle “Jane Eyre,” a product of that county’s most prestigious literary clan. I had never read a word by any of the Brontës, nor had I seen the famous film version of “Jane Eyre” with Joan Fontaine and an uglied-up Orson Welles. My willful ignorance enabled me to approach this canonical text with the eyes of a child.

I started reading soon after our arrival at the house we’d rented for a week on Lake Champlain in Vermont. The plan was for the family to undertake an early-summer decompression after a long spell of work and school. My eldest daughter had just completed her junior year in high school, with its terrifying round of A.P. courses, achievement tests and social pressures. My son had finished eighth grade, which has also become alarmingly stressful in these hyper-expectant times. Both looked like they needed plenty of water sports, maple syrup and sun.

My sympathy for the rigors of my kids’ lives diminished somewhat as I started to read about the orphaned Jane, cast into a harsh world of cruel relations, physical abuse, locked closets and, ultimately, the Lowood Institution for unwanted girls. And not an iPod in sight! Brontë’s writing in the novel’s opening chapters is so powerful that I almost brought the book into the Jacuzzi with me, though fear of dropping it into the froth and having to travel to Burlington for a new copy forced me to keep it on dry land. One of the most remarkable aspects of these vivid early scenes is their reminder that childhood as we now understand it simply did not exist in the 19th century. Children were seen as venal, inadequate little adults, in need of stern education and occasional “correction.” Jane’s physical and spiritual survival at pestilential Lowood is testament to her peerless strength of character, which is established through an unforgettable series of images and set pieces. Brontë’s juxtaposition of her heroine’s unshakable rebelliousness against the resignation of sad, ever-so-drippy Helen Burns does more to establish Jane’s adamant nature than a thousand words of description.

And then, after a wonderfully under-described eight-year interval, it is off to Thornfield Hall and Jane’s confrontation with its brooding master, Edward Rochester. (Brontë possesses an admirable ability to gloss over events — long coach trips, periods of recuperation, puberty — that do not further her narrative.) Writers constantly deal with the prospect of having their lovers “meet cute,” though it is hard to imagine anyone ever topping the moment Rochester emerges before Jane out of the fog on a thundering horse, accompanied by a baying hound. He is a vision of male mystery and dash, yet the moment he is confronted by wee Jane he winds up on his ass, in need of her tiny shoulder to limp home.

Jane’s romance with Rochester is as good as it gets, full of unspoken erotic tension, impossible obstacles and razor-sharp dilemmas. I tore through this part of the book during a spell of squally weather that forced the family to take refuge in our rental. This led to some curious juxtapositions. Caryl was reading Tom Wolfe’s “I Am Charlotte Simmons” on the sofa with me, and when my concentration was broken by some perilously close cracks of thunder, I found myself pondering how dependent Wolfe is on Brontë for his own tale of a shy provincial girl making her way in the big, bad world. Substitute Hoyt and JoJo for Rochester and St. John, Lowood and Thornfield for DuPont College, and you suspect that Wolfe, like Rochester, also allowed himself to be propped up by a diminutive English governess.

More distracting to my concentration was the sound of the first season of “Sex and the City” playing on DVD in the next room. Although I maintain the show is little more than dolled-up porn, my daughter and her visiting friend see it as the pinnacle of urban sophistication, and I’d have needed to summon a serious level of hypocrisy to issue a ban. So Carrie and her friends provided background noise to my reading, chattering about their sexual entanglements just as Jane was confronted with the stark choice of taking on Rochester’s dark past or assuming a missionary position with the sanctimonious young rector St. John Rivers. Once again, I was struck by how easily “Jane Eyre” can be seen as providing a touchstone for a popular contemporary work, though in Carrie’s case the mercurial, mysterious forty-something is Mr. Big, and the boyish alternative has a stud in his tongue.

It isn’t just the archetypal predicament of its heroine that makes “Jane Eyre” so fresh and vital. It is also the utter, untamed wildness of the author’s vision. (The same is supposedly true of her sister’s “Wuthering Heights,” which is already in my bag for next month’s Niagara Falls trip.) One of the reasons I did not go near either of these novels as a man in my 20s was that I feared that they would prove too domesticated. Well, the joke’s on me. What male writer would kill off Helen Burns with such an utter lack of mercy? Or put that surprise package in Rochester’s attic? Nowhere is this wildness more apparent than in the particulars of Jane’s romantic dilemma. Lesser novelists would have framed her choice as between whispered scandal or a life of quiet desperation. Brontë, however, turns the volume up all the way, making Jane select between becoming an older man’s mistress in the South of France or shipping off to India to most likely die of some horrid tropical disease before her 25th birthday.

My favorite moment in the novel comes when Jane contemplates Rochester’s compelling offer to live in sin. Her mind is at war with itself; Feeling becomes locked in pitched battle with Reason. Feeling tells her to damn convention and opt for her one chance at true love, but Reason’s response is remarkable and utterly unexpected: “I care for myself. The more solitary, the more friendless, the more unsustained I am, the more I will respect myself.” What is so incredibly admirable about her decision to turn Rochester down is not its moral rectitude, but rather its erotic sophistication. You suspect that Jane does not really care all that much about violating the conventions of Christianity. What she really wants to avoid is winding up just another of Rochester’s hussies, no different from the “French countesses, Italian signoras, and German grdfinnen” who he always spurned in the end.

In other words, she is adopting a position of romantic self-respect and emotional autonomy that is far beyond the reach of our flamboyantly liberated Carrie, who would almost certainly have taken the villa in Juan les Pins, then shrugged it off when Rochester gave her the boot. The contrast between Jane and Charlotte Simmons proves even more telling. Jane is able to hold onto her self-belief until book’s end and is duly rewarded by Brontë, while Charlotte must abandon her deepest self in order to win a place in the world. It is impossible for a late 20th century man like myself to understand the outrageous courage it must have taken a Yorkshire preacher’s daughter of two centuries ago to conjure this plain young woman without prospects or position who soared beyond the crippling morality and custom of her day. Impossible to understand, but easy to admire.

Next week in Summer School: John Cheever’s “The Wapshot Chronicle”

Page turners can be smart, as in really smart, and not just the pseudo-intelligence of the reviewers’ current darling, “The Rule of Four,” by Ian Caldwell and Dustin Thomason. With that novel, we were promised Donna Tartt meets Umberto Eco, and instead we got way too much turgid maundering on undergraduate life at Princeton and way too little of the fascinating real-life Renaissance book supposedly at the story’s center. Nowhere is it written that smart books must also be overwritten and difficult to follow, either. The hardest thing, after all, is to make it go down easy.

Determined to find unputdownable novels that didn’t make us wince or groan on every page, we plowed through publishers’ recent and forthcoming offerings for books guaranteed to shorten a long flight and make a sunbathing session even more pleasant. Some of these titles you may have already read about, others will be hitting the stores in a month or so. (They can also be ordered or pre-ordered from Powells.com.) All of them belong on the shopping list of readers who aren’t turning off their brains just because it’s June, but who don’t see a beach blanket as quite the right place to tackle a history of the Soviet gulags. We hope at least one of them makes your summer a little sunnier.

“The Narrows”
By Michael Connelly
405 pages
Little, Brown
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All the flaws of Michael Connelly’s writing are on display in “The Narrows”: the humorlessness, the sentimentality disguised as masculine stoicism, the moralistic attitude toward any vaguely disreputable pleasure. In other words, “The Narrows” is, for good and bad, representative of the current state of mainstream hard-boiled fiction in America.

But also on display are Connelly’s considerable talents as a plotter. Even that attribute is not without flaws. He has a tendency to go for one twist too many, pushing his stories over the line from ingenious to “Oh, come on.” Nowhere was that more evident than in “The Poet,” a genuinely creepy serial-killer thriller (as opposed to the showy Grand Guignol of the Thomas Harris school) and a brilliant piece of plotting — until Connelly went for that final twist that nearly made the entire book fall apart.

Still, “The Poet” was crafty enough for Connelly to guarantee a built-in audience for the sequel, which is what “The Narrows” is. It’s also the latest novel featuring Connelly’s now retired LAPD detective hero, Harry Bosch. And it’s the book that marks the end of Connelly’s tales of Terry McCaleb (who first appeared in “Blood Work”), the detective whose retirement was forced by his heart transplant. In other words, “The Narrows” is Connelly’s lollapalooza, a greatest-hits collection that is also a deck clearing, preparing the stage for the next portion of the Harry Bosch saga.

The parallel plots, which should be described as generally as possible, have to do with the return of the Poet and the female FBI agent who has been obsessed with catching him since he eluded her several years before, and with Harry’s investigation into the death of McCaleb, which appears to be from something other than McCaleb’s transplanted heart finally giving out. Connelly keeps a firm grip on the narrative even before the two stories converge, and through the book’s changing voice. Shifting from third-person to two first-person narrators (Harry and the Poet), Connelly doesn’t dilute his narrative drive or his ability to leave you hanging at the end of a chapter.

What is distracting and inescapable here are the patches of bad writing: “You can become unhinged and cut loose from the world. You can believe you are a permanent outsider. But the innocence of a child will bring you back and give you the shield of joy with which to protect yourself.” Ewwww. As Bosch readers know, Harry found he had a 4-year-old daughter at the end of his last case, “Lost Light.” But that’s no excuse. (Ross Macdonald often talked about innocence corrupted without falling into that sort of squishiness.) If you’re a Bosch fan, that passage — and worse — aren’t going to matter. If you haven’t tried Connelly, all I can say is that as a storyteller, he’s good enough so that even crap like that isn’t enough to keep you from turning the pages.

– Charles Taylor

“The Ghost Writer”
By John Harwood
384 pages
Harcourt
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You could label some elements of John Harwood’s ghost story hokey: It’s got veiled specters, accursed paintings, a big old deserted house with a sinister basement. But like one of those gifted cooks who can somehow turn a can of tuna and a handful of rice into a savory dish, Harwood knows how to spin shivers and nerves out of unpromisingly familiar material. “The Ghost Writer” is the first-person account of Gerard Freeman, who spends his 1960s boyhood in a remote Australian town plagued by millipedes and red dust, his father distant and his mother scared of her own shadow. The only time her apprehension lifts is when she’s telling Gerard tales about Staplefield, the stately English country house where she grew up with her beloved grandmother Viola, an exotic realm of chaffinches and hawthorn hedgerows. But even her stories dry up when she catches her son snooping in a secret drawer, where he discovers an old literary journal containing a ghost story written by someone called V.H. and a photograph of a beautiful, unnamed woman.

All this nostalgia and mystery pretty much guarantees that Gerard will get the yen to visit England, and when he becomes pen pals with Alice — an elusive English orphan whom he imagines to be a pre-Raphaelite-style beauty — the die is cast. After his mother’s death, when Gerard has become a quiet, recessive young man feeding off his own longings for faraway things, he heads back to the old country, searching for Staplefield and Alice. A series of short stories, written by Viola and published in various obscure reviews decades earlier, becomes part of the trail. At least one-half of “The Ghost Writer” is made up of Viola’s rich, supremely spooky yarns, all of which seem to involve young men who are martyrs to love and victims of supernatural forces. The stories are obscurely entwined with the fate of Gerard’s mother, whom he suspects of having been involved in a terrible crime. On her deathbed, when Gerard asks her about Viola’s stories, his mother will only tell him, “One came true.”

“The Ghost Writer” has a patchwork quality reminiscent of A.S. Byatt’s “Possession”; each of the several voices (Gerard, Viola, Alice) is entirely distinct, as if the novel were assembled from documentary evidence. Byatt is only the most subterranean of allusions, however, for Harwood weaves many overt literary references — most notably to Henry James’ “Turn of the Screw” — into his book. This isn’t just postmodern cleverness; in fact, it isn’t postmodern at all. Instead, the technique shows Harwood’s keen understanding of how alternating the prosaic with the unreal can create a pervasive creepiness. It’s as if by reading about James’ haunted (or mad) governess, Gerard invites a similar fate. The heady, story-drugged atmosphere of Viola’s tales melts into Gerard’s fairly rational account of his quest, and where the two blur together is exactly the sort of place ghosts come from, the borderline between dream and waking.

Gerard’s investigation of his mother’s past takes him deep into a thicket of fact, fiction and lies that might be someone’s attempt to hide her guilt, but might also be a trap. Harwood’s plot is intricate — it may leave you puzzling out the finer points of the various twists on your own after you follow it breathlessly to its conclusion — but what lingers are Viola’s tales. Some are more inventive than others, particularly a story set in the Reading Room at the British Museum that gives a whole new meaning to the expression “a foggy day in London town.” But all of them have a hypnotic quality that oozes out beyond the solid structure of Harwood’s plot and in the end envelopes it. By the last page, all the loose ends have been tied up, but that aura of the uncanny still clings to everything. As with all the best ghost stories, you’re left feeling that the truth about what happened can never finally be pinned down.

– Laura Miller

“The Shadow of the Wind”
By Carlos Ruiz Zafón
Translated by Lucia Graves
Penguin Press
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The cover of Carlos Ruiz Zafón’s “Shadow of the Wind” sports an atmospheric photograph of a foggy European street at night, and the spine is made to suggest a leather-bound, gold-stamped volume from some venerable library. So you might reasonably guess that this novel is either 1) an evocation of “Casablanca”-style intrigue à la Alan Furst or 2) a bookish thriller in the mode of Arturo Pérez-Reverte. (Ruiz Zafón is Spanish, like Pérez-Reverte, and “The Shadow of the Wind” was a bestseller in his homeland.) It’s neither; Ruiz Zafón has revived the kind of full-blooded story of romance and mystery perfected by Victor Hugo.

“The Shadow of the Wind” has an innocence that doesn’t prevent it from being thoroughly enthralling; at heart, the novel is a story of star-crossed lovers, bold young heroes, their lovably eccentric sidekicks and a cruel, dastardly villain. There are no fiendishly clever twists or secret codes, but Ruiz Zafón doesn’t need them. He sweeps you along with the sheer riverine force of his sincerity and passion.

It’s 1945 in Barcelona, and the brutality of Spain’s recent civil war dominates everyone’s mood. (It’s fascinating to read a European novel in which World War II is a relatively distant conflagration.) The city hasn’t lost its beauty and charm — at least a dozen scenes take place in its famous cafes — but everyone is a little wobbly on their feet. “Wars have no memory and nobody has the courage to understand them until there are no voices left to tell what happened,” as one character puts it. A young boy, Daniel Sempere, is taken by his widower father, a book dealer, to a secret library called the Cemetery of Forgotten Books, and allowed to select one title to adopt and preserve. Daniel picks “The Shadow of the Wind,” by Julian Carax, and falls in love with the novel. He decides to find out more about its obscure author, and thereby hangs the tale.

Despite this bibliographic premise, “The Shadow of the Wind” isn’t really about books. Yes, Daniel does fend off a sinister disfigured man who covets his copy of the Carax novel, and later learns that someone using the name of a character in the book — an alias, in fact, of the devil — has been systematically burning Carax’s books. But we learn next to nothing about novel’s plot or about any of Carax’s other works. The secrets that Daniel seeks as he grows to adolescence all concern Carax himself, a dashing, handsome and intelligent young man whose history includes murky parentage, a generous patron, a doomed love affair, a flight to Paris, an artist’s garret and an ignominious death in a Barcelona alleyway. A sociopathic police inspector hovers over the proceedings, threatening the usual dire consequences for lads who stick their noses where they don’t belong.

The past tugs obscurely at the fabric of Daniel’s life; the further he immerses himself in Carax’s story, the more his own experiences seem to follow a similar pattern. Ruiz Zafón’s novel is elegantly constructed, but not self-consciously so, and there isn’t a speck of real cynicism in it, a refreshing change from the average thriller’s knee-jerk attempts at worldliness. “The Shadow of the Wind” believes in the power of youth to rebuild hope on the bitter, ash-strewn ground of history, and so powerful is the sway of this author’s storytelling, that, for 550 pages at least, he makes you believe it, too.

– Laura Miller

“Emma Brown: A Novel From the Unfinished Manuscript by Charlotte Brontë
By Clare Boylan
437 pages
Viking
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There is a strain of literature, both high and low, which can be summed up by the remark Thelma Ritter makes in “All About Eve”: “Everything but the hound dog yappin’ at her rear end.” Multiply the hound dog into a pack and reduce the rear end to a small one and you have an idea of the relentless misfortune at work in “Emma Brown.”

Clare Boylan’s novel is described as based on an “unfinished manuscript” by Charlotte Brontë. This is generous. What Brontë left behind amounts to 19 pages, the book’s first two chapters. Though Boylan has clearly attempted a work in the Brontëan spirit, incorporating lines from the writer’s letters, it’s Boylan who deserves credit for the heavy lifting here. She’s fashioned a gothic orphan saga from what amounts to a suggestion, one that gives no hint of the complications she has envisioned from it.

The orphan whose posterior proves so tempting to the literal and figurative hounds is Matilda. Left at a boarding school run by two respectably poverty-stricken sisters, the withdrawn child is favored and pampered in expectation of her tenure providing a steady income. When the sisters find out that the man who left her is not her father, and their dreams of financial security evaporate, Matilda, like Frances Hodgson Burnett’s Little Princess, is cast into the attic. She’s rescued temporarily by a local widow, Isabel Chalfont (who narrates part of the tale) and Isabel’s friend Mr. Ellin, a local gentleman who proves to be almost as mysterious as Matilda herself. The rescue is temporary, however, and Matilda is soon cast upon the cruelties of 19th century London.

At times Boylan writes as a retrospective muckraker, outraged at the treatment of women and the poor in this time, and at times she overdoes it, as when the doll that a street urchin plays with turns out to be an infant’s discarded corpse. That detail also suggests the perversity that is one of the strongest parts of “Emma Brown.”

Like many 19th century tales of the downtrodden, “Emma Brown” is a masochistic wallow. Only the masochism is so aggressive that the book feels like anything but a chronicle of passivity. Boylan’s tone combines the hot spiel of the pamphleteer with the slight distance of the social historian, all in the guise of crack storyteller. The result has a slightly guilt-inducing fascination (should we be hungry for stories that deal in misery the way this one does?). In “Emma Brown” Boylan speaks simultaneously from the soapbox and the easy chair in front of the fire.

– Charles Taylor

“Kings of Infinite Space”
By James Hynes
362 pages
St. Martin’s Press
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A cubicled office in a mid-level civil service agency in a featureless central Texas town may sound like an odd place to set a supernatural thriller, but it’s part of the genius of James Hynes’ “Kings of Infinite Space” that he makes you see that it is, in fact, the perfect setting for such a story. Very few novels can manage to be both hilarious and creepy, but this one does. Fewer still can show off their smarts without slowing down the plot, but this one does that, too. Hynes manages to combine an overblown comic-book conspiracy plot with the excruciating social satire of the BBC sitcom “The Office,” and if you think that hybrid sounds unliterary, well, guess again.

Paul Trilby is a former literature postdoc (“almost a Fulbright,” he keeps telling himself) turned temp typist in the General Services Division of the Texas Department of General Services, or GSD of TxDoGs, for short. The services provided by this department are, er, general. That is, they are vaguely delineated but have something to do with trucks. Paul lives in a residential motel and drives a decrepit Dodge Colt with no air conditioning, a purgatorial experience in a town where it hits 85 degrees by 8 a.m. He lives in dread of coming under the authority of Olivia, the ex-cheerleader occupying the cubicle across the aisle; as a vivid warning of what Olivia and TxDoGs can do to man, there’s the pitiful wretch one cube down, whom Paul thinks of only as “the dying tech writer.”

Paul’s fall from grace can be attributed to a single fact: He is a louse. He blew his academic career when he got caught cheating on his rising-star professor wife. Then the grad student he two-timed with left him for a TV weatherman, and two other women he was juggling found out about each other. Then he lost his job at a textbook publisher when he was discovered dropping racy literary allusions like “Vita showed Virginia a thing or two” into grammar exercises to mock his ill-read supervisor. He has hit bottom. And to top it off, he’s being haunted by his ex-wife’s dead cat, a phantom that bites his toes in the middle of the night, restricts his TV reception to cat-related programming, and stinks up his apartment with spectral piss.

Hynes’ previous novels have been academic satires, and at a time when postdocs and adjuncts are forced to flee the shriveled university job market, “Kings of Infinite Space” almost belongs in that category, too. Paul all too believably clings to his education as the last, flimsy shred of superiority he can claim over his co-workers, even the pretty mailroom staffer he discovers poring over the “Norton Anthology of English Literature” in the cafeteria. But the final challenge to Paul’s battered ego and chronic selfishness comes from a strange, pasty, Dilbert-like homeless guy who keeps popping up in unlikely places asking, “Are we not men?” and from a bunch of good ol’ boys from the office who manage to get a lot done without actually working. There are strange noises coming from behind the ceiling panels, Post-it notes that appear out of nowhere, and an aluminum-can recycling bin that periodically becomes bottomless. Something weird is going on at TxDoGs.

It gets a lot weirder, too, with secret societies and subterranean grottos, but bizarre as the main plot gets, Hynes keeps one foot on the ground. There’s a delicate romance kindled between Paul and Callie the mail girl, and some wicked philosophizing occasioned by a visit to a Hooters-style restaurant by the guys at the office. The big mystery, really, is whether Paul will ever grasp what a jerk he’s been and take a few halting steps in the general direction of decency. Years spent reading the cream of English literature couldn’t achieve such an enlightenment, but if a cannibal cult and some major turnover at the Texas Department of General Services can pull it off, that’s all in a day’s work.

– Laura Miller

“The Jane Austen Book Club”
By Karen Joy Fowler
304 pages
G.P. Putnam’s Sons
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Any novel titled “The Jane Austen Book Club” has enough intimations of tweeness without some reviewer making matters worse by calling it civilized. But there’s no escaping the adjective in describing Karen Joy Fowler’s novel. It’s not the thought of Jane Austen that might make some of us flee from what sounds like an unbearably homey premise — a group of women and one man in Central California meeting to discuss the novels of Jane Austen. It’s what some people have done with Austen, ignoring her sharpness and turning her into the literary equivalent of warm milk. Fowler, to her credit, has instead made a perfect glass of lemonade; every time you fear the concoction is turning too sweet, there’s a trace of tartness to keep things in balance.

You can read “The Jane Austen Book Club” for that balanced and sustained tone, or you can admire the book as a piece of comic structure so firm yet so submerged that it isn’t fully apparent until the end. Each chapter, in which the members of the club meet at someone’s house to discuss one of Austen’s novels, is Fowler’s jumping-off point for the backstory of that meeting’s host. These funny, shrewdly observed and sometimes surprisingly wounding segments might form a first-rate short-story collection (that is, if Fowler often didn’t leave you wanting more). But like her beloved Austen, Fowler uses the seemingly self-contained stories to lay the groundwork for the characters to form new alliances. When those alliances become clear, the effect is akin to seeing someone choreograph a comic ballet merely by twirling her fingers.

I must confess that part of the pleasure I took in “The Jane Austen Book Club” is because I’ve almost entirely given up on contemporary literary comedy. There are plenty of novelists who can make me laugh — but usually not the ones who are called comic novelists. Their comedy seems to require a fondness for coyness, or magic realism rendered as deadpan absurdist farce, or just pomo wiseass showing off. Just reading the flap copy exhausts me.

Fowler may succeed not only because she’s squarely in the mode of comic social novelist, but also because “The Jane Austen Book Club” is the work of someone who understands the mixture of surprise and recognition that novel readers crave. We want stories to surprise us and to confirm our experience, or nudge us to confirm what we may never have experienced but which is true. That’s what her Austen acolytes are looking for, and for all the fun she has with them, Fowler understands it’s not a sign of shallowness or of being literary lowbrows. She’s taken exactly the kind of characters it would have been easy to condescend to (or to flatter) and made what they want from novels — a simultaneous sense of comfort and adventure — seem something like a code all fiction readers share. How many novels have used the old phrase “gentle reader” to satirical effect? Reading “The Jane Austen Book Club,” you feel as if Fowler could use it and mean every syllable.

– Charles Taylor

“The Queen of the South”
By Arturo Pérez-Reverte
Translated by Andrew Hurley
438 pages
G.P. Putnam’s Sons
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Arturo Pérez-Reverte’s new novel is a literary narcocorrido, the name given to popular Mexican songs celebrating the exploits of drug traffickers. What lends his subject to a 400-page book rather than a broadsheet ballad set to a polka beat is his protagonist, Teresa Mendoza, who at the peak of her power controls 70 percent of the drug-transport business in the southern Mediterranean. Teresa is no simple macho outlaw, braced to go out in a blaze of glory with an AK-47 in one hand and a bottle of tequila in the other — although she knows her way around both. Her story is necessarily a more complicated and contradictory one than can be squeezed into a song.

Pérez-Reverte, a journalist turned bestselling writer, takes leave of his usual fictional forte here. Instead of a Byzantine plot built around some evocative bit of historical arcana — rare books, nautical charts, fencing — “The Queen of the South” is a straightforward contemporary crime thriller with a reflective, moody soul. It begins with a ringing cellphone, the sound that marks the dividing line in Teresa’s life, between the relatively simple (though never innocent) girl she once was — a former money-changer from the Mexican state of Sinaloa who catches the eye and heart of Güero Dávila, a brash, handsome pilot running shipments for the local drug lords — and the woman she becomes — tough, smart and perpetually on the run. Güero has told her that if that phone ever rings, she should understand that he’s been killed, and that she is next.

Teresa flees to Spain, where she finds a different man who pursues a similar line of work around Gibraltar, where North Africa and Europe almost meet, separated by a narrow strip of water on which a guy with a very fast boat can make a very nice chunk of change. Teresa will learn the hard way, through a process that includes a stint in a Spanish prison, that she’s better off not depending on such men. She’s clever, with a good head for numbers, a knack for mechanics, and a hollow place deep inside her where most other people keep whatever it is they have to lose. These are the makings of a kingpin — make that a queenpin. Eventually she becomes fabulously wealthy and elegant, and is named one of the best-dressed women in Spain.

“The Queen of the South” proceeds according to an unusual rhythm; passages of gasping suspense alternate with brooding psychological rumination and meticulously detailed descriptions of how Teresa’s empire is built and run. Pérez-Reverte returns to his reportorial roots on the last count; he knows so much about drug running it’s gotta be illegal. (Several of the characters Pérez-Reverte portrays are real people, including the Mexican drug lord César “Batman” Güemes.) Then there’s a framing device that probably works better in the original version, in which a journalist putting together a book on Teresa’s life describes his interviews with her past associates. The contrast between his Castilian account and Teresa’s own story — written in a slangy Mexican idiom — has to be more evocative in Spanish.

If “The Queen of the South” were about a man, perhaps it would seem less distinctive; Teresa has many of the dissociative, isolated qualities of the stereotypical noir hero. But because she’s a woman, Pérez-Reverte can use her yearning for wholeness to scrutinize everything that’s stunted about this particular macho ideal. Yes, “The Queen of the South” is a kind of narcocorrido, but it’s also an anti-narcocorrido, an outsider’s inside account of a world in which people are all too willing to sacrifice their humanity for the kind of immortality embodied in a four-minute song.

– Laura Miller