To be effective, Torquemada would have to do either (preferably both) of two things: document in full the spiritual shame and social inanition of late 15th-century Spain or guess its way into the mind of Thomas the Grand Inquisitor himself. Unaccountably, it does neither, and the resulting narrative—thin without austerity, superficial without even the pomp of surfaces—is curiously flavorless.

Perhaps Mr. Fast is trying for a bleak epitome, a skeletal slap in the face. His plot suggests as much….

The whole thing—subsidiary characters who are mere props, timeless and insipid conversations, hackneyed ironies with pigeons and unclad children—reads as if Mr. Fast were bored before he began…. Mr. Fast seems little involved, little tempted to be bold. No doubt his aloofness is supposed to connote ineffable ironies, but it doesn't for me. At the end I felt about Torquemada as, at one point, Mendoza...