Early on in Barbara Kingsolver’s new novel, teenage bookworm and later reclusive author Harrison Shepherd is flicking through The Odyssey. He notes that it “can be reopened to any page, it doesn’t matter which”. Not so this dense, detailed narrative covering 1930s Mexico during the aftermath of the failed revolution (the Mexico of Diego Rivera, Frida Kahlo and their famous fugitive guest, Trotsky, enduring his last place of exile) and McCarthy’s America of the late 1940s. As with Kingsolver’s re-creation of Lumumba’s Congo through the eyes of an imaginary American missionary family in an earlier novel, The Poisonwood Bible, it demands careful reading.

Harrison’s story — told through diaries, letters and press cuttings organised by his secretary and literary executor, “VB” — begins in 1929, on the island of Isla Pixol. His ravishingly pretty, social-­climbing mother Salome has left her American husband, a man of “unheroic complexion”, for the Mexican attaché in Washington and returned with him to her native country. As a “fire bell” — an undivorced woman — she is treated with contemptuous suspicion; her lanky, lonely son devours books and befriends the kitchen hand, the first of many crushes. Like Woody Allen’s everyman, Zelig, Harrison begins to turn up at ­propitious moments in history; a brief spell back in Washington at a military academy (he is expelled for a hushed-up homosexual liaison) sees him witness the brutal treatment of protesting first world war veterans. Returning to Mexico, he falls in with the Rivera/Kahlo household, becoming scribe to none other than Trotsky. Kingsolver’s portrayal of this period, and of Mexico in general is lush, tottering over with heady imagery. The “tiny tempest” Kahlo, her giant frog of a husband, and the fatherly Trotsky, once head of the Red Army, now cheerfully tending his chickens, who fatefully “clasps a pen as if it were an axe handle”, are unforgettably brought to life.

This passion falters and pales when Harrison becomes a more independent character — escaping to “Gringolandia”, the USA, after Trotsky’s murder — as if he cannot hold his own without genuine ­historical figures. Kingsolver employs a March of Time newsreel format to span the short-lived naive idealism of immediate post-war America, the internment of so-called “aliens”, the Berlin blockade, the rise of Mao and the tireless propaganda machine of the Second Red Scare. Harrison, holed up in small-town North Carolina, writes bestselling potboilers of Aztec history, first embraced by returning soldiers as deeply empathic to their plight, then paranoiacally mined as subversive tracts inciting communism. Fiercely supported by “VB” — Violet Brown, his “amanuensis”, a homely version of Kahlo — Harrison faces trial, the transcript of which is a masterpiece of conviction by omission. In a book riddled with elisions, the greatest lacuna is Harrison himself. It seems appropriate that this fascinating novel’s ending remains ambiguous — the bridge between reality and interpretation is a tenuous one.

The Lacuna by Barbara Kingsolver
Faber £18.99 pp528

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