ALBERTO MANGUEL`s News from a Foreign Country Came (Random House, 288 pages, $24 cloth), is a case study of the personality-splitting that is both a cause and an effect of the banality of evil. From the beginning of the first section, "Here," it is clear that the quotidian life of Antoine and Marianne Berence, their daughter Ana, their guest, and their Argentinian servant is not what it seems. The section ends with the violent death of Marianne, who is non compos mentis, and Antoine and Ana`s flight from their Perce, Quebec, summer home, Whatever was wrong remains wrong. The second section, "There," tells about Marianne`s girlhood in Algiers, her marriage to Antoine, a soldier of the French occupation forces, and their life in Algeria, Paris, and Argentina. As "There" ends, Marianne discovers to her horror that the source of the evil in that desperate Latin American country is also the source of the unease in her family. "Here," the last section, is Antoine`s stream-of consciousness monologue to his daughter as they drive toward Quebec City. This change in narrative voice serves its purpose: Antoine reveals some personal information as well as his mental state and so gives a plausible (if distasteful) explanation for his -actions. But, dramatically speaking, the device doesn`t work; it`s too hard to believe that this confessional tumble spill, out of the guarded, rational, and unflappable Antoine. His final act is all too credible, but that he would get an attack of logorrhea before committing it isn`t. Manguel build,; his sunny atmosphere of crushing evil so slowly and controls his plot developments so firmly that News from a Foreign Country Came is intensely gripping, The same cannot be said for Scott Mackay’s A Friend in Barcelona (HarperCollins, 320 pages, $19.95 cloth), although its being billed as a Second World War espionage thriller. The plot revolve, around Goerlitz, a captured U-boat captain who escapes from his prisoner-of war camp, sinks his U-boat, and tries to get back to Germany with information about the English port where he had been held. Mackay tries to develop the complexities of character and theme that make the difference between garden-variety reading and the best popular fiction, but his ability falls short of his ambition. In spite of abundant description. Goerlitz remain-, merely the main actor in Maskay`s plot, not a character, and the other actors in the secondary roles are almost indistinguishable from one another. Worse, plot discrepancies concerning the secondary characters abound: Hatley`s cheeks are still flushed from having sex with his wife after he has driven for perhaps two hours over a muddy road; Ute is 18 when she and Goerlitz are on their honeymoon, but 19 when they meet; Laurie goes into Admiral Carson`s office in the morning, stays only a short time, and emerges at close to 6 p.m.; and so on. Thriller devotees will soon stop paying attention to the espionage and start playing a different game. Typos ("road graters" anachronistic expressions (a "totalled" car), and insensitivity to English speech ("mommy") don`t enhance concentration, either. A Friend in Barcelona is a decent first try, but it isn`t very thrilling. The premise of Patrick Roscoe`s God`s Peculiar Care (Viking Penguin, 256 pages, $26.95 cloth) suggests exciting fictional possibilities: the book reconstructs the kind of life the movie star Frances Farmer might have led after her release from a mental hospital, when she tried in her lobotomized way to find her lost autobiographical manuscript. The book`s title is the title of that manuscript, and the book represents the manuscripts imaginary history. A demented beggar (Frances?) has handed Farmer`s manuscript to Madeleine, the book`s protagonist, but Madeleine can`t read the handwriting. She feels that its important, but she doesn`t understand what it is. Frances Farmer herself appears only on a movie screen, as a goddess worshipped by an oppressed drugstore clerk, and in reports or fabrications by several other characters. She may also be the Frances in a story that Madeleine either makes up, or copies from the manuscript, or builds around something in the manuscript. God`s Peculiar Care is populated by the wretched of the earth street-people, prostitutes, drug addicts, and drifters - and those whose businesses they patronize - a saloon owner, a bartender, a movie-house owner. The characters` mental states range from chronic mild depression through despair to full-blown psychosis, and sustaining interest in this lengthy insiders` view of irrationality isn`t easy. Depression as seen from the inside is at the heart of Marwan Hassan`s The Memory Garden of Miguel Carranza (Cormorant, 132 pages, $10.95 paper). The book raises questions that everyone discusses in youth but tends to drop later on when clear answers don`t emerge: What is the meaning of life? What is knowledge? How much responsibility can (or should) one person take for another? Why does love so seldom prevent or cure a loved ones trouble? Miguel Carranza is a Toronto neurosurgeon; his son committed suicide some time ago, a colleagues car accident was actually suicide, and death inexorably draws in Carranza himself when his life affords him no answers to his questions and no relief from his depression. The Memory Garden of Miguel Carranza is not uplifting. Carranza seems to have answered the other big question, Is there a God?, with a firm no, and as a doctor - with power over life and death - he finds himself a hopelessly inadequate replacement. The book has some realistic touches that promise good things from its author. The oppressive heat of a summer night perfectly objectifies Carranza`s emotional paralysis as he lies outdoors brooding in the darkness, just as his relentless yet controlled night-time driving mirrors his depressed agitation. Hassan hints throughout the book at an Ontario version of a Mediterranean Muslim culture that will, I hope, soon get the fictional airing it deserves. John A. Ishmael`s The Black Bug: The Genetic Bomb Has Arrived (National Publishing, 250 pages, $25 cloth) is a paranoid farrago. Ishmael establishes his claim that the book is based on fact by mingling real people with imaginary characters, science with fantasy, and actual incidents with fiction, regardless of history and chronology. The story is about a world-wide conspiracy centred in South Afrika (sic), where the same evil crew that gave the world AIDS has developed a virus that causes genetic mutation in Blacks. Amid sex and violence, a bewildering assortment of other bad guys steal and mutate this virus so it attacks only whites; finally it turns Afrikaans babies black. At the end, nuclear bombs are about to rain down. The anti-white virus spares only Semites, but, since Arabs (good guys) are also Semites, this selectivity may not support the Jewish conspiracy theory so dear to other writers. Certainly The Black Bug is full of race hatred, but this time the Jews have to share the vilification. Israel is only the second-worst scoundrel; the United States is third, and South Afrika (sic) is top demon. Individually and collectively, Jews take their lumps along with the other objects of Ishmael`s polyvalent loathing. The Black Bug magnifies "It`s all a plot" into a more grandiose thesis: "All plots are one plot" .