Isabel Allende: Portrait in Sepia

By MARGIE THOMSON

Ah, a new Isabel Allende! She is indeed a never-fail device for pleasure, surely one of the world's best (certainly one of the most loved) storytellers. With this latest she completes the trilogy begun in 1985 with The House of the Spirits and continued with 1999's Daughter of Fortune: the story of the de Valle dynasty, of loves, marriages, untimely and timely deaths, of fortunes lost and found. These are layered stories of passion that take place in both the old New World (Chile) and the new New World (late-19th-century San Francisco).

There is a bodice-ripping, highly sexual quality to Portrait in Sepia, as Allende gives full vent to her impassioned imagination.

This book has a looser feel - both sexually and structurally - than its predecessors: it unfolds in a fashion which feels like an ancient kind of storytelling. It is as if, around the campfire, the storyteller has simply opened her mouth and let the words tumble out, with characters shaped and reshaped in the telling, loose ends tied up in sometimes too-convenient ways, and events sprawling far away from their genesis, only to be seized and pulled back into the overall narrative at the last moment.

That said, her books are also becoming more earth-bound than the magic realism of her earlier works. While she is everlastingly romantic, her observations of historical detail are always precise, her descriptions of historical events brutal and unswerving, and Portrait in Sepia ranges over not only the rugged physical and social geography of two continents, but through bloody wars as well. Not only are we treated to the horror (there is no other word) of the War of the Pacific (1879-84) when Chile invaded Peru and Bolivia, but the Chilean civil war as well. Her vivid illustrations of war's reductive nature are a bloodied, if incidental, centrepiece to her wondering, epic saga.

Narrating the story is Aurora del Valle, granddaughter of the two main characters from Daughter of Fortune, Eliza and Tao Chien. Aurora begins her story at her own birth (she has, she says, spent many years piecing together the salient facts) but she quickly backtracks so as to fill us in on events since the closing of Daughter of Fortune. We catch up on Eliza and Tao Chien, and on the extraordinary, vast Paulina del Valle, Aurora's paternal grandmother.

Aurora's mother died in childbirth, leaving the baby to be brought up in San Francisco's Chinatown ("savage ... seething ... its inexhaustible swarms of human bees hurrying back and forth") by Eliza and Tao Chien. But suddenly, without explanation, 5-year-old Aurora is deposited with her other grandmother, abandoned to a life of luxury at the hands of the ambitious, commanding Paulina. But it is luxury tainted by mystery: Aurora does not know who she truly is. No one will tell her who her father is, or why it is that she's haunted throughout her life by the most appalling nightmares and the strange memory of a kind man who smells like the sea. It is this striving for identity which drives the narrative on and which is resolved at story's end.

Aurora develops a passion for photography, which becomes a motif for truth and memory. "Through photography and the written word I try desperately to conquer the transitory nature of my existence, to trap moments before they evanesce, to untangle the confusion of my past," she explains.

And, she confides: "Each of us chooses the tone for telling his or her own story; I would like to choose the durable clarity of a platinum print, but nothing in my destiny possesses that luminosity. I live among diffuse shadings, veiled mysteries, uncertainties; the tone for telling my life is closer to that of a portrait in sepia."

It might not be quite as superlative as Daughter of Fortune, but with Portrait in Sepia the consummate storyteller has again provided a sweeping historical romance to gladden and satisfy her readers.

Flamingo

$29.95

* Margie Thomson is the Herald books editor.