Allende fails to seduce with a new romantic touch

Daughter of Fortuneby Isabel Allende(Flamingo, #16.99) Writing can be compared to making love. Some writers put me off because they so obviously write only in order to be admired, and don't give a damn for any other response in the reader. This is a problem mainly found in the avant-garde, where a distrust of storytelling sometimes leads to overreliance on verbal fireworks, masturbation for voyeurs rather than engaged coupling between reader and writer.

On the other hand, storytelling that is clumsily done is the literary equivalent of bad sex. There are many bestsellers I am unable to read, not because I am a snob and despise storytelling, but because I have not been properly seduced. I want to be seduced by novels, and feel cross when this doesn't happen.

Isabel Allende has had great success with magical realism, a form that can transport the reader into undreamt-of and bewitching worlds. Its appeal is perhaps wearing out, its cliches showing, and so Allende is now wisely trying something different. Her latest novel is a romance in both senses of the word, following the medieval definition of the term, it is concerned with a gallant hero and heroine on a quest, and, in tune with our modern usage, it also tracks the seemingly apocalyptic consequences of falling in love.

Unfortunately, it doesn't deliver the requisite thrills. Allende goes on and on about torrents of passionate feeling but the reader does not experience them. You cannot be swept away by language which is by turns as bland, pompous, sentimental and overelaborate as this; just as you cannot trust a narrative which lurches in midparagraph between omniscient and third-person perspectives, which is rambling and repetitive and which is stuffed with overdetailed passages of description and historical explanation which might have been copied out of reference books.

Sometimes the language is merely clumsy: "From there to allowing him to unbutton her jacket, and then her blouse, was but a few capitulations". Sometimes the writing, particularly about sex, is unintentionally comic: "They met secretly in a tearoom where he delicately savoured five cream eclairs and two cups of chocolate while she stirred her tea Rose could not withstand the eyes stripping her bare and hid her face in her hands, but he pulled them away with the same delicacy he had earlier used to demolish the cream pastries. He was 10 when he fell in love with the person who was to be his mentor, a Frenchwoman old enough to be his mother, with the eyes of a tigress and breasts of pure alabaster".

Over and over again, Allende produces these effects of banality and bathos, often giving the impression that she (or is it her translator?) does not care enough about words to choose and use them precisely. Employing hyperbole too often, she dulls the reader's response: "She wanted to die right there, pierced by the sensation, sharp and no more to be denied than a sword, that was filling her mouth with warm blood and, even before she could identify it, crushing her with the terrible weight of idealised love. Many years later, standing before a human head preserved in a jar of gin, Eliza would remember that first meeting with Joaquin Andicta and again experience the same unbearable anguish".

The story is a potentially interesting one. Set in Anglophile Chile in the mid 19th century, and then in gold-rush San Francisco, it tackles lively subjects such as cross-dressing, cross-cultural love, racism, the allure of fortune-hunting, immigrant experience, brothel life and the abuse of prostitutes.

The ending of the novel is never in doubt. Pregnant by her vanished lover Joaquin, the doughty Eliza follows him north, with the help of her friend Tao Chi'en and, after surviving disasters which would have flattened a lesser woman, finally finds wisdom, peace and true love.

I am only sorry the Frenchwoman with the tiger eyes and alabaster breasts - the mistress originally trained by the Marquis de Sade, who can then teach a man how in the very same moment to unbutton a woman's dress and take the pins from her hair, all the while interspersing kisses with streams of compliments - does not put in a final appearance. Seduced in a "filthy cell" in The Bastille and subsequently armed with "a vast storehouse of amatory wisdom" and all the "tricks of the seraglio", she would certainly have had a ravishing tale to tell.

Michele Roberts most recent book is Impossible Saints (Virago)

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