Donna Wright: Mumbo Gumbo

Reviewed by MARGIE THOMSON

Good for Donna Wright: unconstrained by living in Wellington, she's written a novel that takes in the sticks of Louisiana, the pandemonium of the New Orleans mardi gras, the terrors of modern Haiti, the horrors of the 18th-century slave trade between Guinea and the New World, and the surreal rituals of voodoo.

These exotic scenes are mediated by an energetic cast which includes a New Zealand magazine photographer, Laura Delacross, on assignment in New Orleans; a trailer-living, beer-swilling yet essentially decent black grandmother, Renee Poupet; a handsome Cajun guide, Floyd Simeon; an 18th-century Guinean woman, Tume, torn from her home by French slavers and taken to the sugar plantations of Haiti and Louisiana; and a wild, 18th-century voodoo spirit, Prince le Kreyol.

But wait till you get your head around the story ... Laura gets rotten drunk during mardi gras and is abducted by someone who's awfully like long-dead Prince le Kreyol, who brands her shoulder with a fleur de lis. Soon after, she is arrested for disorderliness and makes it on to television news, topless, so that Renee, watching at home in her trailer, sees the branding and sets out to find this unidentified white woman. Why? Seems she and Laura are the descendants of two players from a much earlier drama, a drama that also unfolds intermittently in this novel — of the mistreatment of Tume by the French Captain de la Croix (Delacross — geddit?). There is a prophecy, enclosed in the improbable diary of Tume, given to Renee by the prince himself, that these two descendants can together find a long-lost cache of gold.

Improbable? Highly, of course, but if you can set aside your scruples, the story romps along with a great deal of panache.

I liked the chunks of Tume's diary best — Wright well invokes the brutality of the slave trade, and one can only shudder at the thought that being human incorporates such behaviour and attitudes as those displayed by the traders and slave owners.

Laura didn't really do it for me — she lost her camera twice, for heaven's sake, and dealt really badly with her relationship problems, sulking irritatingly for much of the second half of the book. While Mumbo Gumbo isn't chick lit, it has aspects of it, especially when it comes to Laura, whose faux, mouthy toughness, feisty vulnerability and proclivity for getting drunk are hallmarks of that genre.

Random House's Black Swan imprint fills a gap in local mainstream fiction, packaging good, light, popular fiction. These books don't win the literary awards, but do strike a chord with the book-buying public. Jenny Pattrick's Denniston Rose and Sarah-Kate Lynch's Blessed Are and By Bread Alone, for instance, proved hugely successful and sat for months on the best-seller lists. Mumbo Gumbo is of that ilk: fun, romantic, plenty of plot going on, and all handled with unpretentious lightness and zest.

* Black Swan, $26.95