By far the most interesting question arising from Isabel Allende's new novel is, who outgrew that most exhausted of literary genres, magic realism, first - Allende or this brisk, if somewhat meandering, narrative?
Still, Allende may well have written the genre out of her imagination with The House of the Spirits (1982, English translation 1985), her first, most original and certainly most convincing performance to date.
Her new book is a historical picaresque which appears to be far more concerned with variations on the theme of female freedom than it is with either story or character; Daughter of Fortune has a hasty feel about it and little sense of period. It seems closer to John Irving than it is to Marquez or Latin American fiction and never quite overcomes the fact that Allende seems caught between wanting to write a long, leisurely period yarn and a snappy authorial impatience which seems to be telling her to wrap it all up as quickly as possible.
Her prose, again translated by Margaret Sayers Penden, is far less lush and images are a rarity. The tone is also far less indulgent. Previously Allende has always created a sense of cosily settling down to deliberately spin extravagant operas of romance and adventure invariably emerging from dark interludes. Her characters have tended to be heroic career romantics.
This time, her wilful heroines - and there are two - wise up to romance. There is a weary harshness about the narrative. It is as if she simply had to write this book not out of some creative urge but because telling stories has become a job to be done.
The book is set in Chile and the US between the years 1843 and 1853. The daughter of the title is Eliza, a young girl who was rescued as a baby from a soap crate and raised in the respectable merchant household by Rosa Sommers, a strong willed English woman. Beautiful and determinedly unmarried, Rosa lives with her bachelor brother in Valparaiso, Chile. The pair have a brother, a sea captain, who roams the seas and the brothels of the world. The sailor's approach to life is the exact opposite to that of his uptight, landlubber brother who appears interested only in business and maintaining respectability.
Rosa is different, a tough Victorian intent on raising her foundling daughter according to the rules of behaviour which should ensure she catches a suitable husband. Not that Rosa has any illusions - as she says, "All husbands are boring . . . No woman with an ounce of sense gets married to be entertained, she marries to be maintained." The ever-youthful Rosa seems to treat the girl as a project by which she may experience motherhood from a distance while also protecting her independence. As expected, she has a half-hearted suitor, a fellow Englishman, a failed Bible salesman, hovering on the sidelines.
Eliza grows up half pampered pet, half prisoner in a house of secrets. Whereas previously Allende has focused on political outrages as the main stage for her stories, this time she uses social convention and the frenetic greed of the Californian Gold Rush as the backdrop. Most of the characters are interested in excess. It is interesting that while her heroines outgrow romance, or at least begin to see it for what it is, the most convincing love story in the book concerns a Chinese doctor and his ongoing romance with his dead wife.
Just as the book is caught between Allende's Latin American approach to narrative and her increasing North American voice, the story itself uses her perceptions of the Chileans and English as an active device. As one of the characters, Jacob Todd, Rosa's failed Bible-salesman suitor, who later reinvents himself as a journalist, observes on coming to feel at home in Valparaiso: "Chileans and English share a number of character traits: they resolve everything with solicitors and barristers; they had an absurd fondness for tradition, patriotic symbols, and routine; they prided themselves on being individualists and enemies of ostentation, which they scorned as social climbing; they seemed amiable and controlled but were capable of great cruelty. However, unlike the English, Chileans were horrified by eccentricity and feared nothing so much as ridicule."
Outwardly Eliza is shaped by Rosa's strict routine of correct deportment and compulsory music lessons, but the person who rears her is the Chilean servant, Mama Fresia, a stock loveable domestic tyrant, whose abrupt departure from the Sommers household forces her employers to admit they don't even know her last name. Young Eliza matures quickly and quietly, predictably falling in love with the first young fellow she meets, the impoverished Joaquin Andieta. Their furtive romance is as whirlwind as would be expected from fiction such as this. The young man, however, the son of an abandoned woman, has other ideas and takes off for the Gold Rush. Eliza does not accept this and sets off after him.
Throughout the novel, however, the reader is always one step ahead of Allende rather than the other way round, even to discerning Eliza's true origins. Events unfold as expected, not by surprise. Rosa was once the victim of a cad, her disgrace becomes a badge of respectability, and so forth. Eliza's thwarted love directs her towards maturity if not development as a fictional character.
There is a curiously half-finished feel about this book. While the narrative is formally divided into three acts or movements, three more obvious divisions present themselves: Chile as the sanctuary, England as a prison and China or, at least, the Chinese imagination, as a liberating force. In one of the novel's few metaphors, Tao Chi'en ponders the beauty and grotesqueness of the traditional bound feet endured by the women of his world. Adopted as evidence of beauty, it is also barbaric. The only thinker in the story, this Fourth Son, who by leaving home acquires an identity, is the only real character in the book. "Fourth Son was a happy child who laughed over nothing, but he also had an unusual ability to concentrate and a keen curiosity for learning." His medical skills are balanced against the magic powers based on superstition and herbs as practised by Mama Fresia.
It is a random narrative, too casual to even be accused of being chaotic, and also replete with messages and morals, most of them admittedly plausible. Allende has assembled a cast of characters who wander in and out. To often she relies on colourful set pieces to confer some element of cohesion. The dialogue is among the worst she has written. It is difficult to accept that any 19th-century character, even in Gold Rush California, would say to the friendly brothel keeper: "All this crap happens to you because you're a nice person." Or that the same friendly brothel keeper would announce to her staff: "This is a shitty profession, girls. Get yourselves married, go study to be teachers. Do something with your f***ing lives and stop hanging around me."
The runaway Eliza owes everything to her Chinese pal yet still she pursues her runaway lover. This continues until eventually, on seeing his head in a jar, she stares at it before finally declaring to Tao: "I am free." A sentiment shared, after close on 400 pages, by the reader, who is left feeling this sketchy novel could have been half that length. Daughter of Fortune may well prove the bridge by which Isabel Allende's fiction finally breaks with her formerly lavish voice and enters a contemporary world, but as this novel confirms, making that choice has not been easy.
Eileen Battersby is a critic and Irish Times journalist
