The earliest entries look back to his childhood on an island off Mexico so remote, that you have to ‘call Jesus’s name 3 times before he hears you’ and continue up to fifties America.
The book is composed of diary entries, short prose pieces, articles and letters collected together to form a coherent whole by Harrison’s faithful secretary Violet Brown. When banished from the Soviet Union by Stalin it is with Rivera that Leon Trotsky spent his final days, and the young Harrison was employed as a secretary, dictating Trotsky’s thoughts and articles. In the fifties Harrison finds himself under the gaze of the anti-communism McCarthy hearings, due to the years he spent in the employment of famous painters Diego Rivera and his wife Frida Kahlo. The main character, Harrison Shepherd, is a writer of popular potboilers set in the days of the Aztecs and Cortes’ invasion of Mexico. And surely no book is worth waiting 10 years for? Well, nearly. The fact that The Lacuna took 10 years to complete and publish imbues it with a certain level of expectation. Largely written in diary format, interspersed with newspaper cuttings, letters and notes by Shepherd’s devoted stenographer Violet Brown, this remarkable novel is a finely crafted story of identity and loyalty.Many readers will know Kingsolver from her 1998 award winning best seller The Poisonwood Bible. As Shepherd’s lawyer observes: “If a man is not a communist, they’ll prove he is.” But to his dismay his colourful past returns to haunt him when the FBI decides to investigate.
At one point he admits to Kahlo that he is “a mouse creeping around the shoes of giant people, trying not to get stepped on”.Īfter Trotsky’s murder in 1940, Shepherd begins a new life in North Carolina, where he puts his masterly talents of observation to good use by writing novels. The only stumbling block is that the larger-than-life Kahlo and Trotsky, with his love of animals and hopes for a world cleansed of evil, are more enthralling than Shepherd. Weaving the stories of real-life characters into a work of fiction is fraught with difficulty but Kingsolver, with her meticulous research and keen eye for historical detail, succeeds magnificently. Kingsolver has admitted that she originally imagined the novel without Frida Kahlo but that “she moved into it”.
By becoming part of their extraordinary circle and acting as their cook and secretary, Shepherd inadvertently throws in his lot with art and revolution – a move which is to have devastating repercussions.
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