BOOK REVIEW / Air and light and drought: 'Consider this, Senora' - Harriet Doerr: Andre Deutsch, 9.99 pounds

MEXICO has long been a useful destination for the American literary imagination. With its rich Catholic culture and large pockets of rural peasantry, it is replete with signifiers: a land of escape and romance, of danger, of whimsy and colour, of innocence and of death. It has fostered many American flights of fancy, and been host to many an improbable tale.

But as one shrewd Mexican comments, in Harriet Doerr's lovely second novel Consider This, Senora, 'When writing of Mexico, the truth is exciting enough.'

Doerr's truth is a village, Amapolas, in the Sixties, and the interaction between the peculiar assortment of North Americans who assemble there by chance, and the local population that tolerates them - with occasional affection, frequent indulgence, and ultimate indifference. Bud Loomis is a sharp-eyed property developer on the run from the Internal Revenue Service; Susanna Ames is a divorcee in her late twenties, a painter whose initial tendency is to render the landscape more pleasing on paper than it is to the eye. Fortune deposits them in the real estate agency in La Luz on the same day, where they hatch a scheme to buy a large piece of ancestral land from Don Enrique Ortiz de Leon, and to subdivide it. Serendipity leads Frances Bowles, 40 and twice divorced, to buy a plot for herself and one for her mother, the widowed Ursula Bowles. It also lures the elusive Herr Otto, a musician. Through months of drought, he plays only and repeatedly the A above middle C, deprived of music as the land is deprived of water (in an echo of The Waste Land's nightingale); and only bursts into 'rivers of music' when at last the parched landscape is visited by rain.

The novel's three women, Sue, Frances and Ursula, are also parched of love, betrayed, abandoned and separated by death. But for Sue and Frances, there is hope for renewal; and for the widow Bowles, there are the poignant recollections of a life lived in love.

When the widow Bowles does eventually meet her end, it is the wisest and most peaceful of passings: 'Our lives are brief beyond our comprehension or our desire, she told herself. We drop like cottonwood leaves from trees after a single frost . . . She could see that an individual life is, in the end, nothing more than a stirring of air, a shifting of light.' It also signals the dissolution, after six years, of the expatriate community in Amapolas. None of the locals are surprised by the departures, just as they were unfazed by the arrivals. Don Enrique opines simply that 'in coming here, they had moved too far from the dwellings and graves of their ancestors.'

Doerr captures beautifully the encounter of two ways of life, that of the baffled unreligious Americans, with their arbitrary peregrinations and whimsical desires; with that of the deeply traditional Catholic Mexicans, who can accommodate the brutality and tragedies of their lives as readily as their joys. Ursula Bowles, in the wisdom of her age, is the character who can straddle both paths, who asks no more than either side can give.

Consider This, Senora has much of the tone of, as well as a similar setting to, Doerr's marvellous first novel, Stone for Ibarra, which won the American Book Award in 1984 (when the author was 74). Both are quiet narratives, deceptively simple in their telling, and charmingly old-fashioned in their declarative prose. But if anything, this second novel is superior to the last, more generous and overarching in its vision. Above all, it offers humour, hope and grace to the three women at its core - in short, to women of all ages - without ever slipping into sentimentality.