The Book of Color

Acclaimed biographer Blackburn (Daisy Bates in the Desert) applies her skills to fiction in this accomplished first novel, the story of a haunted, tormented family over many generations. Despite the narrative's surreal tone (evoked in part by a talking pig), its characters seem dreamily familiar, at least at first, particularly the narrator's uncommunicative, alcoholic, poet father and his grandfather, who shakes with Parkinson's disease. The cast begins to show its unique colors, however, when the story line retreats to the late 1800s. On a remote island in the Indian Ocean, the narrator's great-grandmother, native wife of a British missionary who dedicates himself to obliterating ``copulation'' and witch-doctoring among the islanders, is struck with a curse meant for her husband. After she slowly sinks into madness, her son is sent to England, where he will pass as a ``white man with dark skin.'' A generation later, the narrator's grandfather falls prey to the same fixation with skin color; he concocts a bleach made of peroxide and lemon juice and rubs it on his own son in an attempt to lighten him. More than a tale about the persistence of memory, this novel is a testament to an unruly, unwanted psychic heritage. At one point the author asks, ``Is is possible to inherit memories just as well as the colour of eyes and hair, the shape of lip or nostril?''; by the end of this imaginative, resonant story, the question proves to be dishearteningly rhetorical. (Sept.)