THE LACUNA
by Barbara Kingsolver
Faber and Faber, Hardback; 507 pages
ISBN: 9780571252633
Price £18.99

Rachel Harris

From the author of The Poisonwood Bible comes another gargantuan read: an elegant epistolary novel, recounting one man’s struggle for artistic freedom. Sprawling over two decades – from revolution in 1930s Mexico to McCarthyism in 1940s Carolina – so intricate and immersive is Barbara Kingsolver’s narrative that a review feels like a near insurmountable task. But then difficulty and reconstruction are inherent challenges in a novel riddled with holes – lacunae which are both its strength and weakness. ‘The most important thing about a person is always the thing you don’t know’ proclaims the irascible Frieda Kahlo  (one of many historical figures reanimated by Kingsolver). Like Philip Roth’s American trilogy, The Lacuna examines our often destructive compulsion to read the ‘unknown’ – debunking notions of privacy and the primacy of individual will along the way.

The protagonist of Kingsolver’s thirteenth novel is Harrison Shepherd, an accidental bystander to some of the twentieth century’s most dramatic events  (not least the Bonus Army Riots and the assassination of Trotsky). Half Mexican, half American, Shepherd spends a nomadic childhood moving between hot and cold climes, at the mercy of his mother Salome and her roving affairs. A solitary boy left largely to his own devices, he discovers the ‘companionship of words’ – the security of which will be eroded through the novel’s course.  Interspersed with newspaper clippings and archivist’s notes, The Lacuna is compiled of Shepherd’s notebooks and diaries.

Aged fourteen Shepherd moves to Isla Pixol: a Magical Realist province where portals to other worlds lay in wait. There he discovers the eponymous lacuna, a sea cave littered with Aztec treasures. This encounter has a formative effect on Shepherd, kindling the love of pre-Hispanic history that will later inform his best-selling novels. More principally however, the lacuna will inform his concept of writing as a private enclosure.

While visiting an archaeology site at Teotihuacan, he observes that ‘the ancients were directed by their gods to look for a doorway from earth’. Writing is Shepherd’s ‘doorway’, or so he thinks: an escape from the inconstancy of home life, history, and more importantly, himself. ‘Averse to making himself known’, he is always outside the frame of his narrative – a virtually airtight body of text which elicits little about the narrator. Indeed his occasional habit of stealing – first his mother’s pocket watch, then a stone figurine from the reign of Moctezuma – is testimony to his obscurifying tendencies. But as the human bones lurking at the bottom of the lacuna suggest, sacrifice is in stow for Shepherd and his artistic ideals. As we follow him through his involvement with Trotsky and rise to literary fame, it becomes increasingly evident that public life will make a mockery of his treasured lacunae – and his audience will presume to know “the truth”.

Kingsolver is a terrific storyteller, whose lyrical command of language ensures that The Lacuna, though historically dense, is a joy to read. Furnished with a vast cast of high and low characters (a nod surely to Diego Rivera and the bustling Mexican mural aesthetic), it bursts with animation and jewel-like detail. At its best The Lacuna defamiliarises well-trodden history, instilling famously public moments with private dimensions. A particularly moving portrait of Trotsky’s long suffering wife Natalya comes to mind – artfully arranging furniture in casa Rivera, quietly ‘practiced in the art of creating a still life and taking up residence in it’ after years in hiding.  Shepherd’s passage into the political sphere is likewise mundane: from bread making in childhood he proceeds to plaster mixing, the superior quality of which will attract Rivera’s attention. Throughout the novel there is the double-headed sense of domestic quietude and political furore, a dynamic that reflects its thematic concern with public versus private.

The novel’s biggest shortcoming is its enigmatic narrator. While ambiguities largely electrify the text, the reader remains problematically detached from Shepherd. Constantly reoriented by Kingsolver’s “scrapbook” narrative, and recast by the cultivated characters around him (to Frieda he is ‘insolito’; to Perpetua the cook an ‘odd egg’; to his American schoolmates ‘Mexico’), he serves more successfully as an anchor for the novel’s historical personalities than a compelling voice per se. Nonetheless The Lacuna is a deft, thought-provoking novel, treading a sumptuous course through a politically volatile period.