Long before he wrote One Hundred Years of Solitude and won the 1982 Nobel Prize for literature, Gabriel García Márquez worked as a newspaper reporter in his native Colombia. One autumn day in 1949, his editor at the Bogotá daily asked the 21-year-old journalist to investigate the demolition of an old convent. Márquez watched as workmen broke into the adjacent tombs—and uncovered a flow of coppery red hair which he says was over 22 metres long. It was attached to the skull of a girl, Sierva María de Todos Los Angeles. The discovery led Márquez to recall a legend his grandmother had told him, about a 12-year-old Colombian saint with fantastically long hair who had died of rabies from a dog bite. He speculated that the workmen had found the saint's grave—and now, nearly half a century later, he has transformed his musings into a fanciful if somewhat overwrought novella, Of Love and Other Demons.

Of course, this is far from the first time that Márquez has become attached to something as bizarre as 22 metres of hair. The most famous of Latin America's magic realists, he turned the laws of physics upside down in his 1970 masterpiece, One Hundred Years of Solitude—a book that introduced its readers to such phenomena as blue snow and a magnet so powerful it pulled nails out of walls. And yet, Márquez's reputation as a magic realist has tended to obscure how painstaking an observer he is of actual human life—and how sparingly he has come to use supernatural effects. Indeed, his superb 1988 novel, Love in the Time of Cholera, could almost be described as realistic. And even Of Love and Other Demons, while it recalls the vividly exaggerated characters of his earlier work, confines itself to very few magical images.

It is as though Márquez has recognized how quickly magic realism can pale: after all, if there are miracles on every page, they soon seem less than miraculous. Yet he still favors a gothic elaboration of plot and character, to the point where Of Love and Other Demons seems as intricately carved as a rococo church façade. At the centre of his tale is Sierva—the girl with the long hair—whom Márquez has imagined as the only child of a declining noble family in an unnamed 18th-century Caribbean seaport. Her father, the Marquis, is a man of sloth-like imperturbability, who spends most of his days in his hammock. Her mother is a nymphomaniac and cocaine addict, who is dying miserably of her excesses. Ignored by her parents, Sierva lives with their slaves, who paint her face black and teach her African dialects.

One day in the market, a mad dog bites the girl. Fearing she has rabies (though she never actually manifests its symptoms), her father takes her to various quack doctors—whose barbaric treatment soon drives Sierva to the brink of madness. The Marquis then seeks the advice of the local bishop, who decides that Sierva is possessed by the devil. She is confined in a local convent and a priest. Father Delaura, is assigned to perform an exorcism. He falls in love with her instead, but can do nothing to save her from the determined clutches of the church.

In Latin America, the novel could be read as a fable directed against the Catholic Church—which it portrays as tragically ignorant of reality. After his first meeting with Sierva, Father Delaura tells his bishop, “I do not believe the child is possessed. I believe she is only terrified.” Yet the bishop cannot accept the simple accuracy and humanity of this statement. He believes in demons and therefore must find them, unaware that he himself is possessed by the demons of his own ideological fervor.

This is a situation that clearly has applications well beyond the bounds of religion. The bishop is no different from anyone—technocrat, politician, teacher, parent—who allows a passion for certain systematic beliefs (or for certain random prejudices) to get in the way of seeing reality. The gruesome climax of the novel shows just how destructive such blindness can be, smothering youthful innocence and candor, and with it, society's only chance for a better future.

One of the pleasures of reading Márquez's work is following his meandering detours. Of Love and Other Demons contains the charming story of the Marquis's first, happy marriage to a woman who coaxed him into love by teaching him to play the lute. And then there is the wonderful meeting between Abrenuncio, an atheistic doctor, and Father Delaura, in which their mutual love of learning creates a shaky bridge across their ideological differences.

But such delights do not make up for a certain rigid, airless quality. The best fiction has a suggestive power, an ability to evoke presences not specifically described in the text. In Of Love and Other Demons, Márquez has created such a highly polished surface that it blocks off access to other dimensions and precludes a strong emotional reaction to his tale. His own particular demon—the temptation to keep too tight a grip on his story—has gotten the better of him.