The Sixth Sense

Who was Joaquin Murieta? Accounts differ, but this much we know: California during the Gold Rush was a tinderbox, burning with racial hatred. The spring of 1853 was particularly bad. Newspapers printed stories of a Mexican insurgency; the state legislature authorized the capture of five men whose first name was Joaquin. On July 25, one of them was killed in an arroyo near Coalinga. His head was cut off, preserved in alcohol and placed on display at Natchez’s Arms Store and Pistol Gallery on Clay Street in San Francisco. It was destroyed in the earthquake and fire of 1906.

All else--that Anglos had expelled him from his mining claim, that his wife had been raped and murdered, that he had popular support from the substantial Hispanic community--is conjecture and has turned him into one of the enduring myths of California’s early history. Was he a rebel, or was he an outlaw? We may never know.

Set in the before, during and after of the Gold Rush, “Daughter of Fortune,” Isabel Allende’s first novel in six years, tries to stake a claim in this misty landscape, where the ghost of Murieta can still be heard riding. It is an extravagant tale by a gifted storyteller whose spell brings to life the 19th century world, from the docks of Valparaiso, Chile, to the gaming tables of Hong Kong, from the placers of California’s Central Valley to the fire-scarred streets of San Francisco.

Eliza Sommers is the adopted child of an English couple, an unmarried brother and sister who live in a home overlooking Valparaiso, a wind-swept way station for ships heading into the Pacific. At 16, she falls in love with Joaquin Andieta, an underpaid, threadbare inventory clerk who works for the local English trading company. He’s strikingly handsome, graceful and a revolutionary at heart. Their affair, clandestine and ravishing, is cut short by the discovery of gold on the banks of the American River in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada. Andieta ships out on the promise of a new life, and Eliza follows him nearly a month later, landing in San Francisco, then striking out for the gold fields, aided in part by a Chinese physician, Tao Chi’en, whom she meets along the way.

Eliza’s escape from her past and from the bonds of her youthful passion--and Andieta’s transformation into Joaquin Murieta-- are at the heart of Allende’s story. Yet sadly, we only see half of this process, for the moment Andieta steps aboard a schooner bound for California, swearing his life to “democracy and justice,” he disappears, emerging only later as a rumor, a folk tale, a journalist’s hard copy and finally a pickled head in a bottle of gin, the object of Eliza’s four-year search.

Allende’s decision to keep California’s most wanted man from us is curious and somewhat of a tease, given the political overtones of her story. While skillfully setting up a picture of a world where English and Chileans, Americans and Chinese, Catholics, Protestants, rich and poor live in prisons of prejudice and repression of their own and others’ making, she abandons the lightning bolt that might have struck through it all and, more important, she misses the opportunity to give her heroine a clear and tangible foil. Without Andieta, Eliza has nothing to push herself away from. Her maturity is won in the gauzy realm of memory and time, and “Daughter of Fortune,” while entertaining and well paced, is frustratingly one-dimensional.

Perhaps Allende had hoped that her picture of California would make up for Andieta’s absence. The potential is there and has been worked with wonderful results in such novels as Robert Taylor’s “The Travels of Jaimie McPheeters” (1958) and Thomas Sanchez’s “Rabbit Boss” (1973), stories that depict the region, in differing degrees, as a land of folly and murder, desperation and greed.

One look at the records of the day justifies the conclusion: From 1850 to 1853, the murder rate in San Francisco exceeded one person a day. In 1850, Americans attacked a settlement of Mexican miners prospecting in the southern end of Calaveras County, lynching and murdering scores and driving the rest far away. “The ill-will of the Yankee rabble,” despaired one Vicente Perez Rosales in a letter that has been preserved from the era, “against sons of other nations was rising. This mutual bad feeling explains the bloody hostilities and atrocities we witnessed every day in this land of gold and hope.” Rosales would soon abandon his mine and with his three brothers return home--to Chile.

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Though Allende offers pictures of this darker world, they come across as mere snapshots, dwarfed by the sweeping historical panorama she’s trying to paint and by Eliza’s personal journey. Murieta, an ideal symbol for the anarchy, brutality and injustice of the time, is quickly pushed aside. Dressed as a man, Eliza hooks up with a traveling house of prostitution in her search for her childhood love, and suddenly the world becomes a rather picaresque place, but it is drawn without wit or irony. A bird-pecked corpse swings from an oak with no further explanation; a newspaper recounts the story of a young prospector who is smeared with honey by robbers, tied to a tree and eaten alive by mosquitoes. Too often, “Daughter of Fortune” becomes a catalog of events told at a far remove that, while compelling, undercuts the potential of the narrative, rendering Eliza less a character than a lens through which we see the world.

Unfortunately, the focus is soft. We see the victims but don’t see the crime, and her adventures in search of Murieta become far less interesting than the peripheral events, the most significant of which is the tale of Tao Chi’en, the most completely realized character of the story. His education as a physician in Canton and Hong Kong, early marriage, shanghaied adventures across the Pacific and, later, feelings of displacement and duty in San Francisco have a keener resonance than our heroine’s self-discovery.

By the end of the novel, Eliza finds herself far from the drawing rooms of Valparaiso. “[I]n those last months of riding across the golden landscape of California she felt she was flying free, like a condor. She was awakened one morning by the whinnying of her horse with the full light of dawn in her face, surrounded by tall sequoias that, like centenary guards, had watched over her sleep, by gentle hills, and, far in the distance, purple mountaintops; at that moment, she was filled with an atavistic happiness that was entirely new. . . . Her fears had dissipated in the awesome grandeur of this landscape.”

It is an oddly anachronistic moment for 1850 and reveals “Daughter of Fortune” as a misbegotten romance, in which history is colored to suit the story line. This is, however, a time-honored tradition: Early writers and even the historians of California from Bret Harte to Helen Hunt Jackson softened reality to sentimentalize the portrait, and their readers responded by romanticizing what their fathers had once demonized, the Hispanic and Indian heritage of the land.

One hundred and fifty years later, Allende, new to the state like Harte and Jackson before her, does something similar. The mythology of California is admittedly hard to shake, but the Golden State was not so golden. At one time, long long ago, we needed to believe that it was, but today we need fiction that doesn’t diminish what we know to be true.