After the recent catastrophes in New Orleans and Haiti, I had hoped this novel would teach me something new about the history of those places, but it did not. I kept wondering when the story would take off, but it never did. There is no magical realism here, and little realism of the ordinary kind. It has much more in common with Cartland than with Márquez.

Island Beneath the Sea isn't Allende's greatest work, but she handles a difficult issue with, for the most part, considerable restraint and grace. Allende isn't, and never has been, a terribly subtle writer -- her plots are typically markedly dramatic, and her characters often wear their motivations and emotions on their sleeves. But she's a little more reined in than usual here, despite a few ornate phrasings that might have lost something in translation ("Meanwhile, the French Revolution had hit the colony like the slash of a dragon's tail ... ").

With this admirable novel, Allende cements her reputation as a writer of wide scope and amazing talent. Although very traditional in its unfolding — readers enamored by her use of magical realism will find little in this narrative — this historical novel does what one hopes a book of its ilk will do: transport readers to a new world, open up history and make it come alive, and cause readers to forget time passing in the world the author has so carefully and lovingly built.

Critics devised the label “magical feminism” just for Isabel Allende’s multigenerational family chronicles featuring strong-willed women, usually entangled in steamy love affairs against a backdrop of war and political upheaval. These elements are all present in her latest novel, “Island Beneath the Sea,” which is set partly in late-18th-century Haiti. The protagonist, a mulatto slave named Zarité, is maid to a sugar planter’s wife who gradually goes mad. (The Caribbean seems to have had a reliably deranging effect on women in fiction, from “Jane Eyre” onward.) Even before her mistress’s death, Zarité becomes the concubine of her master, Valmorain, submitting to that role across decades and borders, even when he flees to New Orleans after the 1791 slave revolt. ...
In a welcome revision, Allende brings women to the forefront of the story of the rebellion. She replaces the African war god Ogun with the love goddess Erzulie. (In the one episode that most approaches magic realism, Erzulie possesses Zarité, but even then it’s unclear whether this is merely happening in Zarité’s imagination.) Ultimately, however, Allende has traded innovative language and technique for a fundamentally straight­forward historical pageant. There is plenty of melodrama and coincidence in “Island Beneath the Sea,” but not much magic.

NOT MAGIC, NOT REALISM
This failure to capture history in the making is the greatest contrast between this book and Allende’s early works. The rich texture of details that Allende provided in The House of the Spirits and Of Love and Shadows served to bring a particular universe vividly to life. The rich details were not superfluous or banal—they had a purpose, they represented a larger understanding. In Island Beneath the Sea, by contrast, what we get is a shallow and lazy pastiche of a well-researched historical mise-en-scène embellished by irrelevant but colorful particulars that are supposed to certify the book’s authenticity but are instead a poor substitute for a deeper comprehension of what this moment in history was about.