Isabel Allende
Isabel Allende's 18th book is set in two places: the island of Sainte-Domingue, known today as Haiti, during the slave rebellion of 1791, and the ensuing revolution; and the New Orleans of the early 19th century. On one level, it's the story of Tété, a slave girl who is bought by a French sugar baron and raped by him at the age of 11, eventually bearing the man a child. On another, it's a bloodcurdling depiction of the brutality for which the Antillean sugar trade was notorious.
It's the Haitian half of the book that is most effective. Allende offers gripping and unforgettable images. Slaves are slow-roasted over fires for the crime of running away. Mothers puncture their infants' skulls with pins rather than allow them to grow up in the sweltering cane fields. Fear and suspense permeate every page as we pray for Tété to make it out safely, somehow.
Once the action shifts to New Orleans, however, the pace changes noticeably, and not for the better. Gone is the conflict that drove the reader to frenzies of rage, howls of anguish or heights of hope. In its place, Allende offers Tolstoy-esque scenes of drawing-room intrigue that pale in comparison, even though she could have made use of any one of a number of historical complexities to move the story along. The Deep South circa 1800 was not exactly a paradise of human rights. Compounding matters is the fact that Allende occasionally lapses into didacticism, offering lectures on the history of the Louisiana Purchase or the ultimate fate of Toussaint L'Ouverture, the leader of the Haitian rebels.
Allende's prose, with something of Marquez and even a little Irving, though with none of Irving's puerile shenanigans, is also strongest in the first half. A relation of Chilean leader Salvador Allende, who was deposed in a CIA-backed coup in 1973, she is familiar with living amid political chaos, so maybe this is why we feel utterly immersed in the growing rebellion. This is despite a couple of clumsy attempts at magical realism that really don't work at all. Far stronger is her description of various voodoo rituals, including one where a priestess rips off a chicken's head with her teeth.
But nothing nearly as engaging is going on in New Orleans. Allende lets the conflict slip to an unacceptably low level here, for no character really seems at risk any longer. Therefore, we have little invested. She creates a series of mini-emergencies that might prove interesting, except that at the last minute everything works out and disaster is averted. No one wants to read about people who are happy because they got what they wanted. Once Allende's characters are delivered from their greatest risk, we feel as if we are observing their lives, rather than participating in them.
What Allende seems to have intended in New Orleans is to show how a "symbolic couple of the future" - a white man and a mixed-race woman, who get married in defiance of the law - plant the seeds for a more tolerant America. But the power of this moment is undermined by the utter weirdness of the fact that the couple are also half-brother and sister, both the offspring of Valmorain, the French slave owner.
Valmorain, a significant character, presents his own set of difficulties. We never know if we are supposed to hate him or just feel sorry for him, since Allende casts him as a hapless product of his times and not as a true villain. Like most of her male characters, Valmorain is at worst cruel, at best hopelessly thick-headed. And like most of Allende's female characters, Tété possesses an indomitable spirit, a talent for manipulation and a mystical connection to the divine feminine.
Suppose that we forgive Allende for stamping her characters out of this flavourless postmodern dough. We could ask, in exchange, for a little redemption. But alas, the bad white man never learns from his mistakes. This may be how it was, as Tété often reminds us, but real life and fiction follow different rules. In the end, we feel edified, and slightly raw, but not uplifted.
William Kowalski is the author of Eddie's Bastard and three other novels.