Isabel Allende's past work is impressive. Her stories are captivating,
poignant, human. The House of the Spirits brought her to
international acclaim. Of Love and Shadows stirred her
audiences. Eva Luna sank and soared our spirits. Allende
tells carefully weaved narrations, about her native Chile, about the
ties that bind, about family, about women, about life. She is an
accomplished and skilled novelist.
It is thus with a note of disappointment that I bring myself to review
her latest novel as of 2004, Kingdom of the Golden
Dragon (Spanish title: El Reino del Dragón de
Oro). I read it in Spanish, and an English translation is readily
available. After reading other people's impression of the book, I can
safely assure her English-speaking readers that the problems with this
book cannot be blamed on Allende's craft getting lost in
translation as they had hoped.
On the back cover of The Kingdom of the Golden Dragon we read
that this is a story to be enjoyed by people of all ages, and we know
what that really advertises: it is a children's or young adult's
story. So it is. Within these pages we will follow the voyages of
American adventuress Kate Cold and her grandson Alexander Cold into
the cold reaches of the Himalaya. They travel together again with
quasi-Amazon girl Nadia Santos picking up where they left off in City of the Beasts, Allende's previous work in this trilogy (I
surmise this label is a promise for a third book). The globe-trotting
trio will encounter misery and opulence in the Indian subcontinent,
marauding bandits, Tibetan monks, kings, and princes; the Yeti, and
other uncountable clichés. This reads much more like a
Tintin bande dessineé than a novel of
Isabel Allende.
Listen to the plot summary: Kate and Alexander reside in New York
City working for the magazine International
Geographic. Alexander is a typical teenager like Archie
Andrews, except that he's been a little transformed by his experience
in the Amazon and now insists to be called by his totemic animal, the
jaguar (ROWR!). Nadia, the Amazon jungle teen whom Alexander also
calls "Eagle" (I believe I can fly!) after her own totemic animal,
soon joins them in the Big Apple in preparation for an expedition to
the Forbidden Kingdom (dum, dum, DUM!) of Tibet for photographs for
International Geographic. Elsewhere, the Specialist and the
Collector are arranging to steal the mystical jewel-encrusted Golden
Dragon (oh no!). Naturally, Kate, Alexander, and Nadia happen to be in
the right place at the right time, and after meeting the exotic
natives (oooh!) and many lethal perils (gasp!), with the help of a
mind-bending warrior monk Tensing (ki-YAAH!) and a braveheart prince
Dil-Bahadur (sexy!) foil the plans of the Specialist (curses!) and
save the day (yay!). Of course, most of the hard work is carried out
by the Terrific Teenage Team of Alexander (go, go, power Jaguar!) and
Nadia (jungle babe extraordinaire!) while Kate orchestrates what she
can from the background (gracious Granny!).
Yes, this is The Rocky Horror Show of young adult fiction. I
wished I could have seen this story with a knowing audience and tossed
some toast onto the stage.
The banality of the plot is not my greatest complaint with this
book. There are plenty other problems. First let me mention the
stereotypical portrayal of Indian and Tibetan culture. Buddhism
everywhere, an ideal religion of peace and harmony. Buddhist monks who
regularly perform superhuman feats without batting an eyelash. Rulers
are always wise and benevolent, and everyone is peaceful. Envy,
jealousy, and pride are unheard of. There is no vice in Tibetan
culture, and us savage Westerners would do well to learn from it.
When the Tintin books came out, it was ok to make Tibet seem like a
safe haven, a place isolated from the world for millenia, a perfect
society with a perfect religion. Anyways, who could have known better;
who would have argued otherwise? The Western world was smaller back
then. Finding an "other" culture to cast into the exotic spotlight was
easier. I cannot understand Allende trying to get away with the same
stunt in 2003 when this book came out. She has committed the double
sin of giving us stereotypes and clichés. How could
she build anything but shallow and cookie-cuttered characters
this way?
If someone is trying to present a different culture and can only
resort to stereotypes to do so, that person has only succeeded in
displaying her ignorance of that culture. Even worse is when someone
just gets it wrong. I squirmed each time that Allende used
the word "karma" in lieu of "dharma" to refer to each person's duty or
destiny. When an author fails to look up a word in the dictionary
before she uses it (perhaps in her defense she can say that dharma is not in the dictionary of the Royal Academy of Spanish, although karma is), her credibility will suffer.
The last serious error Allende made in telling this story is in her
use of magic. In her past novels we can find a hint of magical realism
here and there, and it works fine. Magic belongs in magical
realism; we've come to expect it. In Kingdom of the Golden
Dragon, magic, however, is a cure-all, the universal solution, and it feels out of place. We know
that any storyteller who uses magic or any other fantastic element in
her story must make it clear that magic and fantasy often cause as
many problems as the ones they solve. Perhaps we write our stories
this way in reflection of the way technology works precisely so in our
life: fixing as much as it breaks. A story is much more
credible when not everything can be solved with "the power of
the mind" or by "listening with the heart". Magic and fantasy also
require a minimum explanation or internal logic when introduced in a
story. Allende breaks all of these rules, with disastrous results.
It seems that whenever the characters face a serious problem, magic
will always be there to rescue them (the only exception I can find in
this book is when one of the protagonists gets rescued by a pet monkey
-- Disney's Aladdin anyone?). Oh no, can't understand what the
furriners are saying! Not a problem, just "listen with the heart"
(always in quotes) and you will be able to talk with them in perfectly
clear Spanish (or English, if you're reading the translation). Zounds, I
really need to relay a message to my granny! Well, then use telepathy,
silly. Uh-oh, there are many guards in the castle! Pshaw, piece of
cake, just turn invisible and sneak by. An avalanche is about to crush
you to death! Transmogrify into a
jaguar and leap to safety, no sweat. A cobra eyes you menacingly!
Calmly explain in snake talk to Mr Cobra that you are not interested
in getting bitten. Ouch, you fell down a cliff, you're badly bruised,
cold, hungry, and your shoulder is dislocated! Not to worry, you
can invoke Buddhist monks to your rescue if you project your totemic
animal to them. They will have you fixed in a spiffy by healing your
dislocated shoulder with the power of their mind in a few
hours. Remember to "listen with the heart" to their careful telepathic
instructions.
One is reminded of children playing "pretend" games and Everything-Proof
Shields. This was fun when we were five or six years old, and not
much more after that.
I have to defend Allende against her critics on one respect. I can
only agree with them partially about the dialogue. It is a little
stilted and contrived, true, although I find it functional and not terribly
distracting. As for the plot of this book, banal as it may be, it does
have the merit of moving fast. It was the only thing that kept me
reading this book to the end, the urging desire to find out what would
happen next, how the next problem would find its newfangled
solution. Further, maybe I'm an idiot, but I was not expecting the
identity of the villain revealed at the end. I credit Allende with
giving me one surprise in this book. It is comparable to reading a
comic book, flashy colours and shallow story, and perhaps this story
would have worked much better in the same comic book format of
Tintin.
Now we're left to wonder why. Isabel Allende, such a skilled writer,
she's proven herself in the past; why is she writing such drivel now?
And for whom? Is she seeking commercial success? Is she short of cash
and wants to "MAKE MONEY FA$$$T NW!!!"? If so, this
is the wrong way to do it, and a very poor imitation of
J. K. Rowling. I can only imagine that she was writing this book for
preteens or older children who like to live in escapist
fantasy, who want to be told that the Other World out there in the
fog-shrouded Himalayas is just how they imagined it, that teenagers
are kick-ass, and everything-proof shields really work. Other than
those children and those of us who still house such a child in our
hearts, I cannot imagine that anyone else will derive any great
enjoyment from reading this book.
I like her older stuff better. Go read that instead.