Shelf life: Looking at secular books

THE LACUNA
By Barbara Kingsolver
Faber and Faber. 670 pages. £7.99
ISBN 978-0-57125-267-1

This is quite a tome of a book; doorstopper size and with the weight of the Orange Prize for Fiction behind it as well. It comes from an author of impeccable literary qualifications (more of which later), so I was really looking forward to reading it on what I anticipated would be a rather wet week in Scotland.

Well, we had sun, and conversation on the beach proved more interesting than the beginning of the book. It is made up of the notebooks of Harrison Shepherd, a fatherless boy who grows up in 1920s Mexico. A writer and observer, whose early life makes him cautious and reserved, he drifts into the left-wing coterie of artists Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera, eventually becoming secretary for Leon Trotsky. All of this was interesting historically, but, when Harrison flees Mexico for the States after Trotsky’s assassination, I suddenly became interested in him as a character. From that point on I was gripped and began to relish Kingsolver’s very fine writing.

As the story moves to America the notebooks become more personal, and we also start to hear Harrison’s history through other voices; he begins to write novels and his secretary fills in some gaps, newspapers react to his success, and, at last, he is interviewed by the notorious committee for un-American activity. The ending is a very satisfying surprise. The title Lacuna suggests one of the major themes of the novel, for gaps abound. Harrison himself seeks to be swallowed up, to become a blank, to absorb other stories; but at the same time gaps keep appearing in history as inconvenient realities are swept under the carpet in Mexico and America just as in Soviet Russia. The chief villain in all of this is the press, characterised as howler monkeys. Kingsolver has included, amidst fabricated news reports, genuine articles from the period which make uncomfortable reading.

Real hope

In many ways this is a timely novel, thought provoking and poignant. We see how an unwanted child fills himself with celebrities and stories to avoid his own emptiness; we see afresh the hypocrisy and callousness of much journalism. Kingsolver reflects a fractured and fallen world, in which idealism is noble but doomed to failure. Praise God for the gospel which meets a fallen world with real hope.

Sarah Allen