The search for a loved one in 'A Far Country'

The second novel from the author of 'The Piano Tuner' takes the plot of a fairy tale and wraps it in gorgeous prose.

from the March 20, 2007 edition

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It's a four-day journey perched in the back of a flatbed truck, and when she gets to the slums of the New Settlements where Manuela lives, Isabel discovers that no one has seen Isaias for weeks. The strong, ever-practical Manuela tries to comfort her, pointing out that Isaias has disappeared before and has always come home again. "Isaias isn't stupid.... Hopeful, maybe, which is the best friend of stupid, but not stupid."

While she continues to search for Isaias, Isabel settles into her new existence, looking after Manuela's son while Manuela works as a maid for a rich family. On weekends, she breathes in car exhaust fumes all day, waving a flag for a political candidate on a street corner to earn a few dollars.

She makes two friends: Josiane, a teenage mother who works with her, and Alin, a "portrait seller" who makes photo collages for poor people.

Isabel is a largely passive hero whose strengths are her abilities to endure and to listen. Endurance and silence are virtues taught in her village; ambition puzzles her.

"All the way along: a world full of people who want to know what you will be, what is your skill and what is your purpose," she muses. "In the north, if a man had come and said, What will you be? What will you do? I would have laughed at this kind of person that lives all the time in the future."

Readers will probably agree with Josiane, who tells Isabel, "Your problem is that you're too meek." Josiane is baffled by Isabel's search, which consists of wandering the city aimlessly, hoping she runs into Isaias.

"My relatives in the north are like you," Josiane tells her friend. "Waiting people. You probably think the answer will come to you in a dream. You think waiting will solve everything. Maybe it would if you were rich. If you were rich, your brother would be in the papers. Isabel's brother missing! they would say. Top news! But you're not."

"A Far Country" doesn't try to make things easy – once Isabel makes it to the city, the plot gets so vague that readers may struggle to retain a purchase.

But those who persevere will be rewarded by the climax, when Isabel at last discovers what has become of Isaias. While the novel doesn't attain the level of modern myth one senses Mason was striving for, it does achieve a certain power as an imperfectly realized, yet moving, fable.

• Yvonne Zipp regularly reviews fiction for the Monitor.

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