A family history linked to Hawaii’s last king

HOW does our genealogy inform who we are? This is the question Santa Cruz author James D. Houston explores in “Bird of Another Heaven.” The author of such well-received novels as “Snow Mountain Passage” and “Continental Drift” opens in San Francisco in the late 1980s with talk radio host Sheridan “Dan” Brody taking a call from Rosa, who claims to be his grandmother. The 35-year-old Brody is aware of an odd lacuna in his family history. He’s discovered by accident that Hank, the man who raised him, was not his biological father. Rosa’s tale of her mother, Nana Keala, a half Hawaiian, half Native American from California, sets him on a soul-searching journey to learn his true heritage.

The path leads to Hawaii’s last king, Kalakaua, who ruled from 1874 to 1891 and whose history is inextricably tied to Brody through Nana, who was the king’s confidante and attended him at his deathbed.

“Bird of Another Heaven” is many narratives in one, seamlessly constructed, full of rich detail. Throughout are poetic descriptions of late 19th century Northern California, such as this: “From Nani’s [Nana’s] childhood foothills,” Houston writes, “she had moved to the valley’s edge, the valley shaped like an oval flapjack skillet between the long mountain ranges. Out of the place where the ranges curve toward each other and merge to make a tangled knot of peaks and canyons, the Sacramento River flows down into the valley. From east and west, smaller streams and creeks feed its journey south toward the delta islands and the far-off bowl of San Francisco Bay.”

Through Nana’s 19th century diary entries and Rosa’s memories of her beautiful mother, we learn of her family saga set in the Sierra Nevada foothills. There is also a historical account of explorer Gen. John Sutter and the birth of Sacramento, and an examination of the early ties between California and Hawaii.

Houston also follows the extraordinary story of Kalakaua’s nearly two decades on the throne and his slow decline in middle age, “promiscuous and dissolute, a man whose addiction to the pleasures of the flesh left him incapable of ruling anything, let alone a mid-Pacific kingdom.”

Kalakaua oversaw a renaissance of Hawaiian culture and identity. Perhaps most notably, he brought back ancient traditions, including the hula dance, whose dips, swings and chants were a physical way of passing down stories through generations -- stories “of love and war, of birth and death, of demigods and mortals and how the islands emerged in fire from a sea of darkness,” Houston writes.

Thanks to New England missionaries, it had been a tradition in jeopardy. They saw “only bare feet and bare arms, provocative hips and breasts covered by loosely hanging vines,” Houston writes. “For decades now, the preachers from their pulpits had been banning hula in public places, condemning it as crude, lascivious, pagan and barbaric.” But Kalakaua -- always one to delight in scandal and controversy -- restored the hula, and with it the spirit and pride of his country.

Houston also looks back at Hawaii’s inevitable loss of the monarchy, its annexation by an ambitious United States, flexing its might and expanding its economic interests -- all of which seems to resonate in today’s world.

The novel’s parallels between the past and present are subtle but undeniable.

In this ninth novel, the author blends personal drama (Brody’s hopes and struggles, romantic and professional) with a wealth of historical material, mining both in a way that never seems overwhelming or tedious. Each character is fully drawn, and each story line, no matter how apparently disparate at first, comes together.

As a stylist, Houston is quiet and unassuming, but don’t be fooled: The intensity of his novel builds slowly. “Bird of Another Heaven” is a meticulous exploration of love, grief, power, exile, passion and heartbreak.

Carmela Ciuraru is the editor of six anthologies of poetry, including “Beat Poets” and “First Loves.”