BOOK REVIEW / Juggling magic chickens and memories: River of hidden dreams - Connie May Fowler: Bantam, pounds 15.99

'A T THE edge of the mangrove, looking out towards the Gulf of Mexico, there is no horizon. Water and sky become one vast stroke of blue, arching into a dome where clouds rest lazily, on and on - white and pure - eventually disappearing into the unseeable depths of heaven.' This is the strange, haunting, primeval world of Connie May Fowler's second novel, a book whose insistent, irresistible grace lingers teasingly in the back of the mind.

Fowler plays with her characters like a juggler with four balls in the air. She starts with the central narrator, Sadie, and her Cuban lover, Carlos, who love and fight aboard Sadie's old boat moored at Key West. But nobody can hope to understand Sadie without knowing her long-dead grandmother, Mima, an Indian woman who steps on to the page in her own voice to tell her story. Hers is an epic tale of life on the plains cruelly ended by white settlers, of growing up longing to be white herself, of falling in love with a mulatto, Mr Sammy, whose grandparents had been slaves. She moves aside for Mr Sammy to speak his part in their story before he too drifts away and we are back with Sadie and Carlos, in the present.

The plasticity of time has always been the very oxygen of great novels. In the mind of Fowler's heroine run the insistent legends of her ancestors, intertwining themselves insidiously with the anxieties and emotional turbulence of the present.

There is a great truth here. Even if, like Sadie, our memories of grandparents are sketchy, we know something about their memories. Not only do these linger in family lore, but they are mysteriously imprinted on us, unspoken but ineradicable. If all this sounds fey and implausible, I am not doing this book justice. Connie May Fowler is a superb craftsman, palpably unable to write less than beautifully. She steers her craft cleverly between the murky depths of mystical sentimentality and the rocky crags of banality, skilfully avoiding both. Sadie is a real, strong, angry woman, who has spent her life nurturing a self-righteous disdain. But it has not made her happy and she resolves to overcome all the resentments that have made her so tough.

And yet she knows how silly she feels. Roused to fury that Carlos seems to think she needs to be looked after, she puts a bridle on her rage: 'I hear that voice, the new one I've been trying to cultivate, speaking in one of those women-on-TV-joyously-doing-the-laundry lilts: 'Tirades won't do you a bit of good. All he's doing is being kind.' ' Fifty pages earlier, she had been prepared to settle for the prospect that 'Carlos and I will go on with our half-drunken stumble towards death.' Now, her ancestors appeased and her past under control, time has come home to roost.

This is not a book you read for its narrative thrust. Its power is subtler than that. It is a rich mixture of symbolism and folk memory, in which a magic chicken called Miss Raison is a load-bearing totem, a bringer of peace and contentment. After Miss Raison's dramatic demise, the burden of magic descends on a German china half-doll brush, a brilliantly-coloured patchwork quilt, the mummified body of a baby and the wings of a dead heron. Inside, Sadie knows that they don't really mean much - 'not everything has a hidden meaning, or a meaning at all for that matter'. She settles for reality, 'here I am, foolish and drunk and without miracles'. And for once, gloriously, reality will be exactly what she wants.