I liked The lost musicians, but it didn't really strike me as a book by someone who could have been seriously discussed as a candidate for the Nobel. This one does. It's easily in the same league as Independent people, and deserves to be better known.

It's a historical novel in the form of a serial letter from Peder Børresen to a friend in Denmark, describing his experiences after being appointed as pastor to the parish of Tórshavn in the Faroes in the spring of 1669.

Peder is clearly a learned, conscientious and fearless clergyman who numbers some of the most influential people in Denmark among his friends from college days, but a weakness for alcohol has got him into trouble on numerous occasions in the past, and this is only the latest in a series of transfers to remote and backward regions designed to get him out of the way. And obviously another miscalculation, because he is not someone to accept the way his poor parishioners in Tórshavn are being treated by the authorities, and he's soon involved in the fight of his life.

Under the overlordship of Frederick III's notoriously rapacious minister Christoffer von Gabel, the islanders are being robbed blind through the trading monopoly of the Royal Store. They are absolutely dependent on imported grain and timber, and their only real income is from the wool they export. Gabel's officials have absolute control over all communications to and from the islands, and they use that and the criminal justice system - which is equally under their thumbs - to quash any hint of political opposition. The military commandant of the islands is free to amuse himself by raping the islanders' young daughters - anyone who objects is arrested on a trumped-up charge and thrown into the Black Hole.

The pastor finds himself involved in opposition to Gabel from the start - his predecessor's daughter, Rachel, is one of the commandant's victims, and her fiancé, the son of the parish clerk, is in jail awaiting sentence after daring to challenge the commandant. But somehow, although he scarcely believes in that sort of thing himself, he also gets caught up in the islanders' active sense of the supernatural, acquiring a reputation for driving out demons after succeeding in calming a couple of people with mental health problems.

Heinesen manages to capture the flavour of Peder's fiery 17th century combination of anger and self-doubt brilliantly. In Glyn Jones's elegant translation it comes across as belonging to the tradition of Robinson Crusoe and John Bunyan, without ever quite being conspicuously archaic, but also without ever stepping out of the frame to remind you that this is a 21st century translation of a book written in the 1960s. Obviously, the book does have a political agenda: Peder's opposition to the evils of absolutism is meant to make the reader think about Nazi abuses, and also about Denmark's current relationship with its dependencies. He possibly reacts to things that someone used to 17th century absolutism would not have considered unduly excessive (even if he was a graduate of Leiden). But that didn't trouble me whilst I was reading - Heinesen pulls you so completely into Peder's world-view that the 20th and 21st centuries seem quite irrelevant for a while. ( )