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….
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