Kingdom of the Golden Dragon
by Isabel Allende
Flamingo $205
I am half in love with Isabel Allende, although it wasn't always so. Initially, she exasperated me. Spiritualists at levitating tables, furtive lovers, heroic Chinese herbalists, boulevardiers, angels, a bloody putsch - all documented in a froth of prose. Then, I read her memoir, Paula, and my opinion changed. I began reading her backlist backwards, and so entered her backwards world, where sadness segues seamlessly into happiness, and reality dissolves: life as life is remembered, never lived.
Kingdom is Allende's 10th novel, and sequel to City of the Beasts. Her last three books reflect an uncharacteristic spiritual exhaustion. Rich fiction is easily digested by her literary metabolism, but these works are bland. That said, the first sentence intrigues: 'The Buddhist monk named Tensing and his disciple, Prince Dil Bahadur, had been climbing in the high peaks north of the Himalayas for many days, a region of eternal ice where no one but a few lamas had ever ventured.' The plot? Idealistic Alexander Cold arrives in New York, accompanied by his grandmother, Kate. A magazine commissions the eccentric Kate to write about the Kingdom of the Golden Dragon. The Collector ('the second wealthiest man in the world, who had made his fortune by stealing the ideas of his employees and his partners in the field of computers') craves the valuable Golden Dragon. The man he hires to steal it, the Specialist, could 'assassinate the president of Colombia, put a bomb on an airplane, make off with the royal crown of England, kidnap the pope'. Ostensibly a parable of purity (Third World) triumphing over corruption (First World), Kingdom stiffs.
Chapter One (The Land of Snow and Ice) is aptly named. Something in Allende has frozen. 'The prince was unable to answer,' she writes, 'because his voice had frozen in his breast.' What disconnection has taken place? She writes of greed without her usual compassion or humour. The ugliness she documents is fuelled by real disgust. It's as if she's consciously dissociated herself from enchantment, preferring to experiment with Paulo Coelho's stern terrain. But what's left of Allende without magic?