BOOK REVIEW
Expect no answers in mystery set in Hawai'i
By Wanda A. Adams
Advertiser Books Editor
"The Floating City," by Pamela Ball Viking Press, $23.06 hardcover
Pamela Ball crafts sentences that cause other writers to curse jealously under their breaths. Each one is like an old locket with an invisible catch, or an antique desk with a hidden drawer: The thing is beautiful as itself, but you are intrigued as well because there is more, but how to get at it?
Ball, who grew up in Kailua but teaches writing in Florida, begins her second Hawai'i-based novel, "The Floating City," with just such sentences and scenes, describing 1890s Honolulu, the time of the overthrow of Queen Lili'uokalani.
The prologue: "The dead man's journey began above Honolulu, in one of the teahouses that orbit the city like hidden satellites." The opening historical note: "An island rises out of the sea and the trouble begins." The first chapter: "Honolulu is a place that reminds you of what you are not."
But in this novel, a melange of murder mystery, history and romance released by Viking last week, the elusive nature of the central figure leaches away the power of the prose.
Eva Hanson is a fortune-teller who, on the run from the law, has stolen another's name while retaining her family's questionable profession. Landing in the Islands, she rooms with a Hawaiian woman who is lost to opium addiction, sells spells and reads palms for a meager living, and moves like a shadow through Honolulu's troubled streets. Then she and some others find a corpse on a beach and her ill-advised decision to alert the police places her in danger as royalist and government forces scheme against each other.
Caught up in a street scuffle on the day that martial law is declared, she is rescued by an enigmatic Scottsman, McClelland. "How do you decide to trust one person and not another ... It wasn't instinct at all, it was a kind of blindness," she thinks. But soon she realizes she loves him.
Like Eva's friend Lehua, nodding through her narcotic dreams, the reader floats through a hazy landscape, grasping at hints, fidgeting with impatience, wanting to side with Eva but having difficulty finding her, as it were. Will we ever know anything substantive about the dead man, and why he is so important to the government? Will Eva and McClelland do more than meet occasionally? What is this book about?
Ball has said that "The Floating City" is about lies. Lies fascinate Ball, who grew up in what she has called "a family of Norwegian liars." Tall tales were common fare at gatherings; her mother's somewhat cynical view was that anyone who believed everything they were told got what they deserved. Later, in school during early statehood days, Ball recalls the lies she was taught about how Hawai'i came to be part of the United States.
"The Floating City" weaves both of these strains together: the cynical view of one who lives by the gullibility of others and the painful story of a country that was stolen from a people who were more trusting than they should have been.
As with "Lava," published in 1997, Ball has imagined a difficult and complex central character (whose origin, by the way, is a one-line mention Ball once read of a German woman who was said to have been the queen's fortune teller).
But Eva is a character with whom it's difficult to connect; she holds her cards close to her vest even when we are in her point of view, and as the book ends, she floats away again.
But perhaps it is a lie, too, to believe that a novel must always offer what's so often denied in real life — a clear explanation, and a happy ending.
