Go East, young missionary!

Suddenly, in the light of this sexual initiation, the straight and narrow columns into which Vincent accounted saints and sinners seem irrelevant. "He had to wonder if that talent for faith was worth anything at all, if it did nothing but lead you down a series of ever-narrowing pathways until the only real choice was collapse or more believing - fervent belief, belief of a hounded, even manic design that stormed against any contrary opinion." Having fallen into the worst cliché about lecherous missionaries, he's forced to admit, "It's a grayer, more complicated world than I ever imagined."

Just as he considers this for the first time, he's thrown out of his mission in disgrace. The plot drops so smoothly into greater and greater complexity that we barely register the shifts till Vincent is thoroughly entangled in a bizarre arrangement of commerce and desire. Discouraged and penniless, he agrees to help a wealthy Taiwanese businessman acquire a bride from China.

"Heaven Lake" never rushes, but it pulls us along with that mixture of anticipation and dread inspired by being lost in a strange place. As the story moves thousands of miles across the mainland and into the labyrinth of this scheme, Dalton demonstrates his remarkable skill at portraying the culture that Vincent finds so captivating and baffling. Old stereotypes about "inscrutable Orientals" fade into a far broader sense of inscrutable adulthood in which everything is indefinite and half glimpsed.

It's a far more nuanced treatment than "Lost in Translation," the widely praised film that showed the Japanese as unfathomably alien and soulless. Vincent finds the Asians endlessly puzzling, but his surprise always forces him to reevaluate himself and evolve from his own naiveté, rather than sink into the kind of smug depression that Bill Murray captured so well.

Of course, missionaries rarely come off looking good in fiction (or history), but this novel isn't so much anti-Christian as antipiety. With just the right touch of wit, Dalton analyzes the complex interaction of devotion and vanity, naiveté and spirituality. It's as though he's recorded the shattering of faith with a high-speed camera that allows him to play back the collapse for us, frame by frame in a captivating series of images.

The modest hope and humanity that Vincent finally clings to might look flimsy next to the shiny armor he used to wear, but in fact they're more durable and ultimately more transcendent than all his old rules. This is a story as sensitive to the complexities and beauties of China as to the territory of the human heart.

• Ron Charles is the Monitor's book editor. Send e-mail comments about the book section toRon Charles.

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