Rana Dasgupta: Tokyo cancelled

Authors use the figleaf "magic realism" when they need to cover up the terrible fact they've been writing fantasy. It's an unhelpful pseudo-classification for the most part, covering so many different kinds of writing that its descriptive power is nearly nil — but as a broad rule of thumb, it comes in two flavours.

On the one hand, you have stories governed by a beguiling mix of logic and dream-logic. The inexplicable may happen, but some part of your mind recognises that everything is being governed by a powerful and coherent vision.

Then there's writing where logic, dream-logic and all other limitations on authorial whim have been sent to Siberia. Anything can happen, nothing means anything, and the paper the optimistic publisher has committed to the enterprise might as well have been used to start a fire.

If you want an illustration of how thin the dividing line between these two types of writing can be, try Rana Dasgupta's first book. Thirteen airline passengers find themselves marooned in an air terminal overnight en route to Tokyo. To while away the time, they each tell a story.

Though the stories range widely in location and subject matter, they all share exactly the same style; the fiction that 13 different voices are involved has become an embarrassing distraction by chapter three. The stories clearly all stem from one mind, but you could as easily construct a novel out of 13 random selections from the collected works of Katherine Mansfield.

All entirely forgiveable, if the stories are strong enough. And initially, it seems as if Dasgupta's bald, easy prose and his ability to turn modern concerns like cloning and globalisation into folk tale motifs are all the collection needs. The first story — a charming, sad fable about a tailor who is granted a royal commission, and then ruined when his high-born client turns on him — pulls you into the book effortlessly. Stranger ones follow. A boy becomes the custodian of all humanity's memories; Robert De Niro's love child becomes a powerful wizard; a changeling tries to ease an old man's death and loses his immortality.

Taken individually, most of these stories would work perfectly well. The problem is cumulative: the demands on your credulity are no greater in the later stories than in the early ones, but after half a dozen stories have pivoted on absurd events, awkward questions start to rear their heads. You notice that Dasgupta only plumbs for random events of the narratively convenient variety. Things feel contrived.

At this point, it slides over the line from magic-realist-good to magic-realist-bad. Anything can happen: so nothing matters.

* David Larsen is an Auckland reviewer.

* 4th Estate, $34.95