“You had better write all this in your notebook, so when nothing is left of us but bones, someone will know where we went,” Salomé tells her son Harrison Shepherd, in the opening pages of The Lacuna , Barbara Kingsolver's first novel in nine years.
The setting is a hacienda on the Mexican island of Isla Pixol that belongs to Salomé's oilman lover Enrique. A Mexican flapper, Salomé has run away from her boring American husband — Harrison's father — in search of a man with the big bucks, but Isla Pixol isn't what she had envisioned. Daily, the pair are terrorised by terrible howling in the woods, which Enrique cruelly has them believe emerges from “saucer-eyed devils screaming in those trees, fighting over the territorial right to consume human flesh.” Only a year later do they learn that the howlers are actually harmless monkeys.
Dominant theme
The dramatic howlers work as an introduction to one of the dominant themes of the book: the gap or lacuna that exists between what is real and “reality” as it is presented by vested parties. The lacunas in Kingsolver's book are many — a hidden cave, a missing diary, the gap between actual events and the way they are sensationalised by the press. But it is in such lacunas, argues the author, that the real truths are buried. As one character in the book says: “The most important thing about a person is always the thing you don't know.”
Kingsolver's seminal novel The Poisonwood Bible was acclaimed for its ability to make connections between important historical events and individual lives, and she attempts to do the same in The Lacuna. Harrison's life intersects with dramatic periods from both geographies of his parentage, Mexico after the revolution, America during the McCarthy witch-hunts and the spectre of communism.
Harrison's life gets entangled — albeit in peripheral ways as cook, plaster-mixer and typist — with those of the celebrated painter Frida Kahlo, her equally celebrated muralist husband Diego Rivera and their guest “Lev” Trotsky. Kingsolver succeeds well with the recreation of the Rivera-Kahlo households; the two artists come to incendiary life and the telling of their stories has the feel of being meticulously researched. By comparison, Kingsolver's account of Trotsky as a sort of genial grandfather in exile seems a bit one-dimensional and disingenuous.
Kingsolver explores the clash between art and politics, both in Mexico and later in the U.S. where Harrison eventually goes to try his hand at being a writer of historical potboilers. In this way, multiple perceptions about history are explored.
“Humanity has never succeeded in rationalising its history,” says one character; another argues that the American public is comfortable only when reading about other civilisation's histories and mistakes, and events such as Howard Hughes flying a plane or the kidnapping of Lindbergh's baby are used to set timeframes. History, in other words, is a powerful character in the book, but not always a useful one — the narrative feels its weight and the story can buckle under its oppressive pressure.
The narrative device of The Lacuna is to let the story unfold as jottings in Harrison's diaries, newspaper cuttings, and an — initially mysterious — archivist's notes. Structurally, the boundaries are further blurred by Kingsolver using both fictional and actual newspaper reports, to chart the tumultuous times into which she throws her protagonist.
Despite the format of the diary, the narrator Harrison Shepherd is a curiously elusive character, and surprisingly little of his inner life is revealed. He is the proverbial fly-on-the wall for a large chunk of the book, an observer rather than a participant, unwilling for his diaries to be published or his own story made known. His secretary Violet Brown, who saves his diaries even when asked to burn them, asks: “Well, why write it down in the first place, then?”
Reasonable question
It's a reasonable question. For example, some recent scholarship about Anne Frank, one of the most famous diarists of all time, argues that she kept her diary with the hope of having it made public one day; that Anne rewrote and edited parts of her diary with publication in mind. The veracity of the diaries is not in doubt; only the purpose of its writing. A person like Harrison's mother Salome might believe the purpose of writing things down is the hope of immortality that it offers, a chance for the words to live beyond their lifetimes. “You believe a book is burned, yet the words persist,” observes Ms Brown, which is one of the book's lacunas that holds out a redemptive hope.
The Lacuna;Barbara Kingsolver, Faber and Faber, 527 pages
