Isabel Allende's territory could not be more different from the muted Chekhovian land of the ordinary in which much of western fiction, and that of Ireland in particular, has resided for much of the 20th century. Joyce makes an Odyssey of the everyday, but Allende is closer to the spirit of Homer. For her, the heroic, not to say the melodramatic, is the stuff of fiction.
The title of this novel, translated by Margaret Sayers Peden, whose work Isabel Allende admires, hints that it is a gentle, nostalgic tale. Nothing could be further from the truth. Here is no quiet exploration of history or series of gentle epiphanies, but a family epic so crammed with sensational event that the writer often seems short of breath as she dashes to keep up with the narrative rush.
The story is set at the turn of the 19th/20th centuries, and its principal settings are San Francisco and Chile, although, as is usual in Allende's fiction, people, furniture and exotic garments are shipped across the Atlantic and up and down the coasts of the Americas with some frequency. As is also usual, there is a large cast of energetically eccentric characters, all related to the heroine, Lai Ming or Aurora Del Valle.
The most noteworthy figures are Pauline Del Valle, the domineering, rich and bejewelled grandmother; a literary aunt who writes pornography in secret and romantic fiction openly, becoming (thanks to the latter) the favourite author of Queen Victoria; Aurora's mother, the most beautiful girl in San Francisco; and a rich cad who could have stalked straight out of the red barn (daddy).
Legs are amputated without anaesthetic, a woman dies of childbirth, passionate adultery is committed nightly in the sensuous setting of a stable, a wise opponent of the child prostitution industry in Chinatown is bludgeoned to death in a narrow alley, a villain dies of syphilis. Not quite my idea of sepia.
Aurora Del Valle narrates the story, even though it begins many years prior to her birth. This event occurs in highly dramatic circumstances, in Chinatown in San Francisco, and the initial section of the novel offers a fascinating, colourful view of life there towards the end of the 19th century. But Aurora is taken in by Pauline Del Valle when she is five years old, and brought up as a rich San Francisco Chilean.
Eventually she marries an aristocratic rancher from home and moves down there, a flit which opens the way for wonderful accounts of Chilean life and history, specifically the civil war and life under the dictatorial president Balcameda - a dictatorship which may remind readers, according to the blurb on the back of the novel, of general Pinochet's more recent regime. Maybe it will.
Aurora herself is independent and feminist, and has a professional passion: photography. She is a model career woman in that she lets nothing, not war or plague or marriage or infidelity, tempt her from her craft of taking pictures. Although the technicalities of 19th-century photography and Aurora's skills - extraordinary of course - are described in some detail, this is the least successful part of the novel, and seems to sit unconvincingly on top of the plot, a worthy but unconvincing metaphor for the artistic modern woman.
When not taking photographs or dealing with her troublesome relatives, the grown-up Aurora is troubled by nightmares and a vague feeling that something terrible happened in the cluttered woodshed of her past. Eventually, she discovers precisely what this is.
The drama of the denouement is somewhat diluted for the reader, however, who already knows a great deal of Aurora's early history. The one event which causes her life-long trauma is indeed horrific, but not quite awful enough to eclipse all the many disturbing dramas of her childhood. Real shock effect requires a backdrop of restraint, something which a novel of this kind inevitably lacks. It is too rich to spring surprises that can stun.
What are rather stunning are Allende's asides: "Most men, however Catholic they might be, were eager to modernise the country (Chile) - (but) upper-class women and the clergy were pulling the strings of power"; "In times of trouble, people eat more sweets". Such ideas, idiosyncratic but striking, stud the narrative and are more interesting than the story itself.
Still waters run deep, and it may be that Allende's speed as a narrator, her justly lauded skill as a storyteller, prevent her from lingering long enough over any single event or character to explore it in any profundity.
Portrait in Sepia is a scramble through the rapids rather than a deep-sea dive, but its energy, optimism and joie de vivre compensate for anything it lacks in the way of depth. As well as affording us a refreshingly opinionated look at the history of Chile and of San Francisco, it is an exceptionally lively and entertaining story.
╔ilis N∅ Dhuibhne's latest book, The Pale Gold of Alaska, was recently published in paperback by Hodder Headline