Book review: The Lacuna

Published on Friday 20 November 2009 18:44

THE Lacuna By Barbara Kingsolver Faber, 528pp, £18.99

WHEN we first meet Harrison William Shepherd, the protagonist of Barbara Kingsolver's breathtaking novel, he is a quiet, dreamy 12-year-old living on a Mexican hacienda with his self-dramatising mother, Salom, both of them petrified by the howling monkeys in the trees above, which they believe to be carnivorous demons. "You had better write all this in your notebook," Salom tells Shepherd, "so when nothing is left of us but bones, someone will know where we went." He does, and this book draws on them to take us deep into the history of his time.

Salom had ended up in Mexico after ditching her drab American husband (Shepherd's father) in Washington DC, and chasing an oilman back to his Mexican estate. There, as Salom sulks over her love life, Shepherd befriends the hacienda's cook, who turns him into a sous-chef. His other close companions are the volumes in the hacienda library and his notebook, which he regards as "a prisoner's plan for escape". In the short term, though, it's Salom who escapes first – bolting for Mexico City in pursuit of an American she calls "Mr Produce The Cash" – and, after him, others.

His mother is not a puta, Shepherd reflects with detached sympathy, even as he overhears her "bedroom jolly-ups" through thin walls. She's just a romantic woman who yearns for "an admirer" as she tries to put a roof over their heads. None the less, while still in his teens the boy embarks upon a different path, toward a life unruled by passion. "People contort themselves around the terror of being alone, making any compromise against that," he observes later in life. "It's a great freedom to give up on love and get on with everything else." But it's a freedom more easily imagined than lived.

Leaving his mother to her affairs, Shepherd gets a job mixing plaster for Diego Rivera's murals and joins the household as cook and typist for Rivera, his artist wife, Frida Kahlo, and later for their guest, the exiled Communist leader Leon Trotsky. In this incendiary household, Shepherd keeps mum and lets louder egos roar, just as he did back in Mexico. Baking bread by day, he records the daily dramas of this entourage by night, along with a draft of his first novel, an epic of the Aztec empire. But in 1940, when Trotsky is assassinated, Shepherd leaves Mexico to settle in North Carolina. There he becomes a reclusive, gentlemanly author of swashbuckling Mexican historical novels until the McCarthyite Communist witch hunt drags him into the spotlight.

Shepherd had thought discretion would protect him, since his private thoughts were safely interred in his journals. "Dios habla por el que calla," he likes to tell his devoted secretary, Violet Brown: "God speaks for the silent man." The book we read today, she reveals, was assembled by her in 1959 from Shepherd's junked notebooks and sealed for 50 years, to be opened in 2009 – when she hoped it could inform readers about "those who laboured and birthed the times they have inherited".

How can the experiences of a fictional loner merge with those of larger-than-life historical figures? And what can readers learn from their intersection? Those are the questions answered here, in a novel that plunges into Shepherd's notebooks to dredge a history larger than his own, touching on everything from Trotskyism, Stalinism and the Red scare to racism, mass hysteria and the media's intrusion into personal and national affairs.

More than half a century on, names such as Trotsky, Rivera, Kahlo and McCarthy can lose their definition, like coins with the faces rubbed off. Shepherd's reminiscences step in where the historical record can't, restoring human contours. To Shepherd, working as a cook in the Rivera kitchen, Trotsky was more than a defender of the working man; he was a person of flesh and blood – "compact, muscular", with the build of a peasant, who clasped a pen "as if it were an axe handle" and liked to feed chickens when he wasn't writing. Trotsky's optimism – while he was in exile and under death threats – leads Shepherd to marvel: "Does a man become a revolutionary out of the belief he's entitled to joy rather than submission?"

Frida Kahlo tells Shepherd he has a "pierced soul" like her own and respects his artistic commitment, even as she teases him cruelly for his closeted sexual drives. "To be a good artist you have to know something that's true," she tells him; and reputation isn't worth worrying about: "People will always stare at the queer birds like you and me."

Coasting on a pleasure boat through the floating gardens of Xochimilco with Trotsky (who was briefly her lover), Shepherd and Trotsky's secretary, Van, whom Shepherd secretly loves, Kahlo buys a woven toy called a trapanovio "for catching boyfriends" and taunts him to try it on Van. Shepherd keeps the toy as a "souvenir of a remarkable humiliation".

Yet Shepherd, who learned compassion for others if not for himself at his diva mother's knee, soothes Kahlo when Rivera wants a divorce. "Even in her disconsolate state she looked like a peacock," he notices. "Perfectly dressed in a green silk skirt and enough jewellery to sink a boat. Even drowning, Frida would cling to vanity."

Such texture doesn't interest the heavies from the House Un-American Activities Committee, for whom the names Trotsky, Rivera and Kahlo set off Communist-menace alarm bells. In 1947, meeting with his lawyer in North Carolina to discuss a letter from FBI chief J Edgar Hoover, Shepherd doesn't understand why the police would care about his Mexican past. "I was a cook," he explains. "Let me just say," the lawyer replies, "these subtleties are lost."

The Lacuna can be enjoyed sheerly for the music of its passages on nature, archaeology, food and friendship; or for its portraits of real and invented people; or for its harmonious choir of voices. But the fuller value of Kingsolver's novel lies in its call to conscience and connection. She has mined Shepherd's richly imagined history to create a tableau vivant of epochs and people that time has transformed almost past recognition. Through Shepherd's resurrected notebooks, Kingsolver gives voice to truths whose teller could express them only in silence.