Barry Lopez doesn't pretend that people of conscience find easy answers in dangerous times.

Instead, what he offers in his latest book is a cunning work of fiction likely to provoke anyone with hope for the future to reassess their current strategies for happiness.

A premier nature writer and the winner of the National Book Award for Arctic Dreams, Lopez gives us nine linked stories in Resistance. He sets his characters in a not-far-off future, citizens of an unnamed nation. But his "Department of Inland Security" evokes the real Department of Homeland Security, and readers can assume that Lopez is among those terrified about the war on terrorism's threat to individual freedoms, artistic and otherwise.

Each story is written by a man or woman whose creative work prompts Inland Security to send a letter threatening "harsh punishment for fooling with the country's destiny."

Says Owen Daniels, the first narrator: "The letter explained, in phrases that bore the brushstrokes of zealots and lawyers, that we were to be sought out, quizzed, and possibly punished or isolated from society, because we 'were terrorizing the imaginations of our fellow citizens' with our books, paintings, and performances."

"The human imagination," the letter speculated, "was a problematic force, its use best left to experts."

Despite suggested ties to modern realities, Lopez's book is much more than a political allegory against a specific U.S. administration.

Because of the author's artistry and shaman-like understanding of the human heart, Resistance transcends the present crisis to confront fundamental questions in any era: What is the purpose of a human life and how can we survive to a common future?

For example, Daniels, a curator living in Paris, introduces the testimonies of his eight friends by saying, "We give you a description of the events that changed us, that led to our decisions no longer to be silent, no longer to hunker down in the small rooms of our lives."

For Lisa Meyer, an installation artist in Buenos Aires, those events include discovering that her father's an adulterer and her mother is stricken with a fatal illness.

Before dying, her mother reveals that she met Lisa's father in the Bergen-Belsen death camp. She hands Lisa a copy of Viktor Frankl's Man's Search for Meaning, tells her to read it and ask the wayward father "about all the things we were trying to escape."

"Frankl's description of his spiritual crisis in Auschwitz pulled me forcefully in and I read it straight through," Lisa writes. "His triumph over despair, his refusal to become the victim of his own sense of injustice, was mesmerizing."

The characters in Resistance share with Frankl a seriousness of inquiry into the meaning of life, along with intimate voices of beguiling candor.

Most of them find faith in the future through connections with the past. They pay particular attention to wisdom of the indigenous cultures specifically maligned by the Department of Inland Security as "unadvanced."

Elizabeth Wangfu, fluent in eight Chinese languages, for example, finds herself working in a remote region of northwest China, traveling by camel 300 miles across the Takla Makan desert with a friend who is a camel trader, a widower who "did not seem to have a century."

In a chapter titled "The Bear in the Road," Edward Larmirande seeks guidance from his boyhood mentor, Virgil Night Crow, a member of the Assiniboine people in Montana. Edward's immediate problem is that he can't figure out why he has been visited by a bear in several situations that even a guy who went to law school might interpret as omens.

"He's trying to get your attention I guess," Virgil said.

"What do you think I should do?"

"Pay attention."

Through these mesmerizing stories, Lopez challenges us all to pay attention to how well our lives express our deepest values.

But beware, the author warns: In dangerous times, a life based on such values may provoke powerful opposition, requiring high skill in the art of resistance.

Len Edgerly is a poet living in Denver.

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