"The House of Spirits" by Isabel Allende

 A family saga doubling as the history of a country. The author Allende was second cousin to Salvador Allende, who, having been elected Marxist president of Chile, was killed during a military coup. The book's last quarter is a description of a military coup and the terror unleashed by the subsequent dictatorship. Until that point, it seems to be a slightly meandering account of three generations of the family of Esteban, a violent man, a right-winger who subsequently becomes a Senator and his clairvoyant wife, Clara. This element introduces significant elements of magic: salt-cellars are moved by psychokinesis, dreamed predictions come true etc. This aspect of the book, together with its intent to tell the history of a nation, make it comparable with Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children which had been published the year before.

It is written in the past tense and mostly in the third person omnipresent, although occasionally a first-person section (narrated by Esteban) intrudes. The Epilogue is another first-person narrative written by the person whom we then discover to have been the narrator of the rest of the book. The chapters are long, averaging over thirty pages, and the paragraphs tend to be long, not infrequently more than a page in length. This can make it heavy going. Nevertheless I finished it in five days.

It was narrative heavy, with a great deal of exposition, which enabled the author to get through a great deal of material. Perhaps this was necessary: the canvas of this book is large. After all, as the author suggests in the Epilogue: “Memory is fragile and the space of a single life is brief, passing so quickly that we never get a chance to see the relationship between events; we cannot gauge the consequences of our acts, and we believe in the fiction of past, present, and future, but it may also be true that everything happens simultaneously.” (Epilogue) So there is a lot of stuff to write about. Nor does the narrative skim the surface: this tapestry is richly embroidered. Nevertheless, for all that, it seemed a little heavy on the tell rather than the show, and there were times when I wanted less exposition.

There are, occasionally, moments when the narrator breaks through to hint at what is to come, such as: “This story could not have been written if she hadn't intervened to rescue us and, in the process, our memories.” (Ch 4)

Selected quotes:

• “The only one whose appearance was enhanced by mourning was the church's patron saint, Sebastian, for during holy week the faithful were spared the sight of that body twisted in the most indecent posture, pierced by arrows, and dripping with blood and tears like a suffering homosexual, whose wounds, kept miraculously fresh by Father Restrepo’s brush, made Clara tremble with disgust.” (Ch 1)
• “She had buried him once before, which explained why she had room for doubt with her this time his death was real.” (Ch 1)
• “It seemed that no sooner did he roll in the pasture with the girl than she became pregnant.” (Ch 2)
• “The weed-choked garden where the statues of the Olympian gods stood naked and covered with pigeon droppings.” (Ch 7)
• “She attempted to establish a system of communication with Blanca that would allow them to circumvent the terrible delays of the postal system, but telepathy did not always work and she was never sure how the message would be received.” (Ch 7)
• “Pedro Tercero Garcia holding her in his arms, stroking and kissing her, and eliciting from her the same profound harmony he drew from his guitar.” (Ch 8)
• “That lost gaze often observed in those who eat only vegetables.” (Ch 9)
• “The military's scrupulous honesty for the unimportant.” (Epilogue)

This is the first novel of Allende's I have read and it hasn't awakened in me a longing to read more of her oeuvre. I think I prefer the less  mainstream South American writers such as Jorge Luis Borges (A Universal History of Infamy) or Gabriel Garcia Marquez (Chronicle of a Death Foretold). 

May 2026; 491 pages

Allende's debut novel

First published in Spanish as La Casas de los espiritus in 1981

The first English translation was published by Knopf in 1985

My paperback version (translated by Magda Bogin) was issued by Vintage in 2011

This review was written by

the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling 

and The Kids of God

"An Orchestra of Minorities" by Chigozie Obiomoa

Shortlisted for the Booker Prize 2019.

This story is narrated by the chi - a sort of cross between a guardian angel and a soul - of the protagonist. This is a useful conceit for two reasons. Firstly, because the chi has been reincarnated through a number of lives and so knows more about the behaviours of humanity than its host, enabling the narration to comment sagely from a position of detachment on what is happening. Secondly, because the chi can, from time to time, leave the host’s body and therefore know more about the situation than the protagonist. For both these reasons, the principally first person narration achieves a degree of omniscience. (This is tempered somewhat when the chi explains that what the host cannot say, he cannot say, a rule he has already repeatedly broken, which seems to be the narrator's attempt to have the best of both worlds.)

A third reason emerged just over half way through the book when a killing occurs. The chi then spends a whole chapter popping up to heaven to discuss things with God. Someone (I think it might have been E M Forster) once said that when you reach a climax in your story, when you have got your reader hanging on every word, desperate to know what happens next, have your character look out of the window just to prolong the suspense. Having a chi as narrator enables this to happen. 

As if to compensate for this supernatural element, the story is narrated in a very pedestrian style in which things happen one after another with little embellishment. This includes calling a spade a spade: for example, the protagonist urinates, he copulates. This is a style I associate with other African books such as Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart and its sequels No Longer at Ease and Arrow of God. I also thought of Grey Bees by Andrey Kurkov and One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich by Alexander Solzhenitsyn. This everyday style is interrupted whenever the chi communes with his spirit colleagues, when the prose becomes much more flowery, and when the chi quotes proverbs and sayings, which can be quite picturesque (see selected quotes).

But it also reminded me of The Sunken Land Begins to Rise Again by M. John Harrison, which grounds a fantastic tale with meticulous observations of everyday life, and Glister by John Burnside which combines mystery with gritty reality. 

Is this sort of style the best technique to achieve verisimilitude when you are asking readers to accept fantastical storylines, such as in novels using magic realism, or ones far from their experience of everyday, such as novels set in a war zone or a prison camp? 

Surprisingly, given this prosaic style, I found myself on an emotional roller-coaster, at least in the first part of the story. The protagonist falls in love with a woman of much higher status than himself; when he meets her family he is humiliated by them. I empathised deeply. He decides that the family will never let him marry her unless he improves himself and so, because he loves her deeply, he sells his home and his business so he can travel abroad for an education. 

But then, about 40% of the way through the book, the story seemed to morph into a recreation of the 'hero's journey'. The long first section had established the status quo ante; despite a prophecy of doom, the hero determines on a quest (to improve his lowly status so that he can get the girl, a girl for whom, very early on, he has made an animal sacrifice). Then, in a chapter actually entitled "Crossing the threshold", he travels to a liminal realm (Northern Cyprus, a quasi state recognised by almost no other nation) where he meets challenges, guides and helpers (eg Tobe) not all of whom are friendly. He undergoes (another chapter heading) a "metamorphosis" while enduring a time of trial at the end of which, despite having nothing left, he makes a gift of the little that he does have (glossed with a Biblical reference about going two miles with someone who asks you to go one mile with them). At his lowest point he has a near death experience. Rather unexpectedly reborn he returns (in a chapter headed "Return") to his own world a sadder but wiser man and (again unexpectedly) receives at least a partial restitution for his suffering. However, unlike the happy ever after endings of a fairy tale, this story has a tragic twist in its tail (this is not a spoiler, given that the narrative is cast as the hero's chi, pleading for forgiveness for his host, who has killed, or might have killed, a pregnant woman).

I rather lost my motivation during the Cyprus interlude. It seemed to drag. I found it more difficult to empathise with a character who no longer possessed agency but seemed little more than an object to which things happened. I was no longer 'involved' in the story. And I became increasingly irritated by the supernatural bits, especially the affectation of introducing chapters and even some paragraphs with one of the names of the deity. 

I was also confused about whether one is supposed to sympathise with the protagonist or not. We know, throughout, that the chi is pleading mitigating circumstances for a bad deed done by the protagonist. That suggests that the author wants the reader to be on the protagonist's side. But is he a goodie or a baddie? He is described as "a shepherd of birds" (Ch 5) and shepherds are conventionally seen as good people (like Jesus) but shepherds exploit their flock, taking their produce and killing the creatures for whom they have cared; shepherds are predators. The title of the book refers to the collective distress of his flock of birds mourning when one of the chicks is snatched by a hawk. Given that the hero is portrayed as a poor man, helpless against the bullying of the rich, especially when he travels to Cyprus, I supposed that the title of the book is a metaphor for all the poor people of the world, so many from the African continent, who are preyed upon by the rich people in the world. 

Perhaps he is making the point that those who have power, no matter how much or how little, prey upon those who have less power. That is the theme of my novel The Kids of God.

A recurrent motif is the story of the gosling whom the protagonist loved as a child, after his father had killed the gosling's mother for sport. But the gosling was tethered and, eventually, in a foreshadowing of the plot, killed by the protagonist. "For each man kills the thing he loves," as Oscar Wilde wrote. In may ways the fatal flaw of this hero was that, like a dog in the manger, he couldn't bear to see someone else getting enjoyment from one whom he loved.

I suppose that might be the point. The author is inviting us to appreciate the protagonist with all his faults. As the French say: “Tout comprendre c'est tout pardonner”; to understand all is to forgive all. We are sitting in judgement upon this man who has done something awful, upon this man who is a representative of the poor people of the world, the dispossessed, upon this Everyman, upon this shepherd, upon this man who in some ways represents Jesus himself, and we are asked to understand his strengths and weaknesses and to weigh him in the balance and to decide whether to forgive him. 

Alternatively, one of the members of my U3A Meads reading group suggested that the chi might be an unreliable narrator. She supported this contention with the following evidence (page numbers from the paperback edition):

On page 374, the chi explicitly states that he is only allowed to remember what the host 'affirms to' which is a little at odds with the fact that the chi can relate occasions when he has left the host's body and gone to places of which the host has, presumably, no idea, unless the host dreams these experiences.

On page 339, the chi says: “ I know it is possible that our recollections are not always accurate.....”

And in the preface, the chi has assrted: “If the prey do not produce their version of the tale, the predators will always be the heroes in the stories of the hunt”.

Delightfully, the book is written in a mixture of English, Igbo and Pidgin. Frustratingly, the Igbo and Pidgin are rarely translated. Annoyingly, sometimes Igbo is used at a key moment in the text. Is this book supposed to be inaccessible to non-Igbo speakers? Is the reader supposed to use Google Translate to find out what is going on? If ever there was a case for footnotes, this is it.

Selected quotes:

• "Loneliness is the violent dog that barks interminably through the long night of grief." (Ch 2)
• "After he had combed through the thick hide of night, as one would search for lice on the skin of a densely furred animal, he returned home in anguish." (Ch 2)
• "He broke from the group like a wheel unhooked from a fast-moving car and rolled into the void." (Ch 3)
• "When a man encounters something that reminds him of an unpleasant event in his past, he pauses at the door of the new experience, carefully considering whether or not to go in. If he has already stepped in, he may retrace his steps and reconsider whether to re-enter." (Ch 4)
• "Discretion was at the centre of his self-esteem. It was must be kept alive to maintain him." (Ch 4)
• "I have dwelt among mankind long enough to realise that they do not store information about those who have hurt them as they do others. This kind is kept in tightly sealed jars whose lids must be opened to remember them." (Ch 4)
• "He decided to attend the party with only a part of him attuned to it, dragging along the other intransigent half." (Ch 7)
• "The character of human shame is chameleonic." (Ch 8)
• "Soon, someone who has a bachelor's degree would be useless, because everyone would have it." (Ch 8)
• "A person must reconsider their position if everyone else is saying something that contradicts their own position." (Ch 8) A refutation of Kipling's "If you can keep your head while all about you/ Are losing theirs and blaming it on you." 
• "Seeds sown in secret always yield the most vibrant fruit." (Ch 9)
• "For this was the way of the universe: when a man has reached the edge of his peace, the universe lends a hand, usually in the form of another person." (Ch 11)
• "The worst thing adversity can do to someone is to make them become who they are not." (Ch 12)
• "Speak only what you know. If a fact is thin, do not feed it to make it fat. If a fact is rich, do not take from it to make it lowly. If a fact is short, do not stretch it to make it long. Truth resists the hand that creates it, so that it is not bound by that hand. It must exist in the state in which it was first created." (Ch 13)
• "It is God that swats the fly from the bottom of a tailless cow and from the food of the blind man." (Ch 15) Another refutation , this time of the proverb "God helps those who help themselves"; inverting it to become 'God helps those who cannot help themselves."
• "A man sits here all day, merely alive, the enamels of life peeling away from him and withering into flecks at his feet." (Ch 18)
• "Anticipation is one of the most curious habits of the human mind. It is a drop of vicious blood in the vein of time." (Ch 20)
• "Revenge is a debris field." (Ch 20)
• "He wept for the time which would not replenish itself." (Ch 20)
• "The mind of man is a field in a wild forest on which something, no matter how small, must graze." (Ch 26)

A carefully crafted novel with an ingenious narrative technique and some delightful insights into the human condition. May 2024; 512 pages

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

"The Sunken Land Begins to Rise Again" by M John Harrison

What brilliant writing. Winner of the Goldsmith's Prize for 'fiction at its most novel' in 2020.

This was a fascinating book. Although it has been characterised as fantasy, because the author has written works of fantasy and scifi before, it is embedded so deeply in gritty reality that I think its genre is more magical realism. 

There is an element of fantasy in it. There are repeated references to water and both the major characters have experiences of strange green creatures associated with the water. This is flagged up in some folklore and urban myths, such as the tale of a seventy-year-old man who believed there were things alive in his toilet bowl: "Everywhere Patrick Reed passed water, green children grew." (Ch 5) with the suggestion that these creatures, like aphids, can photosynthesise.

The watery theme runs through the book. Every chapter has some reference to water, or fish, or something aqueous. Many of the characters have names that link to something aquatic, such as Pearl, or Reed, or Shaw {Shore}. The townsfolk where Victoria lives seem to be fascinated by The Water Babies. Shaw lives in Wharf Terrace and works on a barge. Victoria's favourite cafe turns into an aquarium shop. 

It shares a feeling that the characters a deeply embedded in their locations, much like the novels of John Burnside (for example Glister and The Devil's Footprints). In chapter three, Shaw, one of the two protagonists, tells Victoria, the other one, that he is "making his way dérive by dérive up the Brent river." I had to look up the meaning of 'dérive'. It is a French word, translated as drift, and refers to an unplanned journey through an urban landscape; it was coined in 1956 by an avant garde intellectual and can be used to analyse the 'psychogeography' of a situation. This, I think, is a clue to the book. The characters more or less meander through their urban environments, Shaw in riverside London, Victoria is a Midlands town on the Severn. Neither of them have definite directions, both are drifting. There is some sort of plot underlying it all, I think, but there seemed to me to be a number of loose ends and neither protagonist nor myself really understood what was going on. Nevertheless, I found it compelling reading.

In the sense that the characters wander through a landscape, it is very like Ulysses by James Joyce, or Hunger by Knut Hamsun, or Mrs Dalloway by Virginia Woolf, and it made me wonder whether all stream-of-consciousness books are essentially dérives. But this novel is not stream of consciousness. It is told in the third person and it feels more like Kazuo Ishiguro's The Unconsoled, another dérive with elements of fantasy, which in turn has been compared with Kafka.

The style of the prose, and this is definitely one of those books you read for the prose, reminded by of the work of Tony Hanania such as Homesick and Eros Island. It seems characterised by original descriptions and closely observed behaviours. One of the hallmarks is the non-sequitur: "The wind rose a little, bringing smells of fried food and the faint sounds of jackdaws keeping watch from the ruins of Geoffrey de Lacy's keep. To get some idea of its own strength, perhaps, it rustled about in the dry-cleaner's bag on Pearl's arm. She looked down absently and then away again." (Ch 7). That final sentence is unmoored from what went before and what comes after. In chapter 12, Shaw critiques the logic of Tim's beliefs and book: "None of it made any sense to Shaw. When he said so, Time nodded wisely, as if a careful academic point had been made. 'What haunts me is exactly that! In the end, is logic in any sense the right method to be applying here?' ... Stories reproduced from every type of science periodical appeared cheek-by-jowl with listicle and urban myth. These essentially unrelated objects were connected by grammatically correct means to produce apparently causal relationships. Perfectly sound pivots, such as 'however' or 'while it remains true that' connected propositions empty of any actual meaning, as if the writer had learned to mimic sentence structure without having any idea how to link it to its own content." (Ch 12) I felt that the author was being, to some extent, self-referential, mirroring this sort of prose to give his narrative an eerie sense of unreality whilst using descriptions to boost verisimilitude, creating a sense of contradiction.

Much of the dialogue has the feel of snippets of overheard conversation, squashed together. Of Victoria's emails, it is said: "They were less like emails than the sound of a cheerful but indistinct radio programme coming from an open window a little way down the street." (Ch 12) The dialogue is like that, less for communication than to flesh out the ambience of a situation. 

I loved it!

Selected quotes:

• "The tea had a metallic taste, as if it was dissolving a spoon." (Ch 2)
• "The woods were soft. Sluggish brooks dissected them at random. Beneath sphagnum and hart's tongue and crusts of dead leaves over black mud lay the contorted and paradoxical strata from which, for almost a thousand years, the local profits had been gouged." (Ch 7) This is a book founded on 'contorted and paradoxical strata'. 
• "Early afternoon had fixed the old man and his daughter like figures in a symbolic painting, the one hunched eternally over his meal, the debris of which had spread to the table around the plate; the other behind the counter, with her damp cloth, her still life of cupcakes under glass and her long-distance stare." (Ch 7)
• "His eyes were the oldest, most used-up part of him." (Ch 7)
• "The scaffolding had already come down, across a morning, pole after pole ringing on the bed of the waiting lorry like the parts of an experimental xylophone." (Ch 7)
• "They bustled out of their cars, slammed the doors, greeted each other in unison an octave apart: 'Orright?' The subsequent exchange often took place under the auspices of saying goodbye. Over before it began, it nevertheless seemed difficult to complete. No one was anxious to let anyone go." (Ch 8)
• "He was staring into the display window of an estate agent, one of the crocodile of a dozen or so that slithered its way up the high street from the river." (Ch 13). Why is it that estate agents always hunt in packs?
• "In repose their faces had the raw look of people who have become, too early in life, estate agents or wellness coordinators." (Ch 14)
• "It had started to rain. The quenched air outside the window smelled autumnal - rubbish bins, diesel particulates, something unidentifiable from the river." (Ch 15)
• "The air was dark and rain-stained." (Ch 16)
• "People assume they have a swim bladder ... some basic assumption - less about themselves than about their world - that keeps them, upright and afloat." (Ch 16)

Mesmerisingly well-written. April 2024; 254 pages

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

 

"Angels of Destruction" by Keith Donohue

In the middle of a bitterly cold winter, beautifully described, a nine-year-old girl appears to a widow. Is the girl really the old lady's grand-daughter, or is she a  runaway, a con artist or a lunatic, or is she actually an angel? And how will her arrival change what happened ten years ago, when the widow's daughter ran away with a boyfriend to join a terrorist group called the Angels of Destruction? 

There are parallels are motifs running through this clever story. It flits around the margins of otherworldiness, so you never see the monsters full on (when they can start looking silly), and there are always questions left in your mind.

The book is told in three parts, the middle taking us back ten years, with a present-day epilogue, in the past tense, from a multi-character PoV.

 Selected quotes:

• "Winter blew right through her." (1.1)
• "The wind blew against his face and through his hair, for the stranger carried winter in his coattails." (1.5)
• "The few other shoppers ... shuffled in a daze from bin to bin, and Margaret read in every face some suffering or disappointment, their hopes and dreams marked down, 40 percent off." (1.9)
• "The lonesome, like the mad, know one another on sight." (1.10)
• "The depth of his emptiness scared her." (1. 29)
• "She saw his unabashed hope, his bright smile. A smile that said the world will one day crush such a boy, but not today." (1.30)
• "We live more in our bodies than they do. Boys give them up as young men, discarding the body to live inside their minds. But girls and their bodies become women and live in the same skin." (2.4)
• "Game of life, indeed. It is no game, let me tell you, but a jigsaw that you can never finish. Always a couple of pieces missing, or one that fits in nowhere, and the cover to the box is gone, so you've no picture to offer a clue as to what it's supposed to look like." (2.14)
• "Kids may not know a lot about life - but don't say the young don't know about love. It's the only thing they do know." (2.18)
• "An order of bullets stood in the French fry holsters." (3.11)
• "You sit in a spot and don't realize that everything you left is changing too, and you think that maybe someday you'll get the chance, but then it's too late." (3.13)
• "All of us seek forgiveness." (3.15)

Also by Keith Donohue and reviewed in this blog:

• The Stolen Child

May 2022; 347 pages

This review was written by the author of Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

I had to look up Ecclesiastes chapter 7 verse 4, which is referenced in part two of the book, so I thought I would help the reader. It says: "The heart of the wise is in the house of mourning, but the heart of fools is in the house of pleasure." (New International Version).