The House of Spirits

I’ve not come across Isabel Allende before.  I think she must have been hidden away in some certain dark corner of The List.  The House of Spirits is the only of her books to feature and, not to damn it with faint praise, it’s good.  It’s Allende’s first novel and it’s a shame that it is her only work on The List because I’d love to see how she develops as an author, there are bits of her work that I think if they refined through a couple more books, would morph into something fantastic. 

Allende’s book tells the story of one family through four generations- although the first generation is out of the way fairly early on.  It focuses on married couple Clara and Esteban Trueba, their respective parents, as well as their children and granddaughter.  It is only Esteban who is present throughout the entire novel and although he is (at times) the narrator and it is the tale of his life, his power lost and gained, this is very much the story of the women of the family.  Esteban builds a fortune and becomes a senator at the time of deep political unrest in Chile- he is adamantly conservative while the rest of his family is pretty left wing.  Somehow despite all the conflict this naturally causes, he remains the beloved patriarch of the Trueba clan.  The House of Spirits is a long book with a lot of characters, so it’s impossible to concisely outline the plot of the thing.  And I understand I’m making it sound like Esteban’s story.  Even though the overarching narrative is his, the story is made up of women who find routes to power, despite being a position of little or no authority in society.

Of course, this is more than just the tale of a family.  Esteban’s political leanings aside, Clara is a clairvoyant.  This is what gives her power.  She is the lynchpin of her family, not just because of the love she has for them, but because her word is so often more than law.  It is the literal future.  When she dies, half way through the book, she is never really gone.  Just as, in life, she could speak to the dead; in death she continues to influence the living.  Her knowledge of the spirit world also makes her unknowable.  This, too, is power.  Esteban is a man in control of everything when in his prime.  He can love Clara but he can never own her. 

There was only one thing that put me off about this book and that was the shifting narrator.  Almost all of The House of Spirits is told in the third person but, for a few pages or so every chapter, it moves into Esteban’s voice.  I’m not sure why this is.  It doesn’t add enough to the story to justify how jarring it is every time it happens.  I can only assume that Allende gives Esteban this voice as he is the least likeable of the characters by far.  He is responsible for his family falling apart, and it’s really only because of the first person interludes that we know that his actions are the product of misguided love.  They are his saving grace.

I’m not too sure what it was, but I didn’t love this book.  It was perfectly good whenever I was reading it, but whenever I put it down I lacked the motivation to go back to it.  And I’m not sure why.  Despite its sprawling nature, it’s remarkably easy to care about each of the characters (even if Esteban is a bit awful at times).  I think I wanted more from this book than it was able to provide- I was after something unputdownable, and this is essentially a pretty quiet family drama, with a bit of politics thrown in.  But even this doesn’t cause the reader too much drama.  Clara’s visions mean that the reader is long forewarned against any death and, for that; House of Sprits loses its emotional punch. 

My next blog will be about Time’s Arrow by Martin Amis.