Imperfect but brave Lacuna (Faber and Faber £7.99) Reviewed by Piers Mostyn Born of an American father and Mexican mother, Harrison Shepherd grows up in 1920s Mexico. This novel is the narration of his life story over He works for the artist Diego Rivera, becoming part of the household and developing a friendship with Frida Kahlo. The Rivera/Kahlo relationship is explored as is their art and its relationship to post-revoluPretty soon Trotsky rocks up, granted asylum through Rivera's intervention with the Mexican President. Shepherd becomes cook and typist for Trotsky. There follows an intimate portrait of the besieged revolutionary and his entourage - writing theory, maintaining contact with a worldwide movement in retreat from the Stalinist terror and preparing for the inevitable assassination. With Trotsky's murder, Shepherd moves north to develop a career as a novelist in a post-War USA wracked by racism, McCarthyism and cold war paranoia. The witchunting is a parallel to the earlier drive against Trotsky and his followers. It exposes the ironic fallacy underling a McCarthyism that pursues anti-Stalinists in the name of defending 'freedom and democracy in the USA against Stalinist totalitarianism'. The book is an invitation to Americans to rediscover the lost history not just of their country but their continent and its position in the world. Narrator Shepherd's novels are pitched as "historicalromances" set in the ancient empires of the indigenous peoples. But the McCarthyites deem them to contain coded messages warning of the imminent demise of a bloated contemporary empire - the USA. This leads us to consider whether Lacuna itself might shed light on our understanding of the USA today. Perhaps the author is encouraging comparisons with post-9/11 islamophobia and repression. Kingsolver was one of few public intellectuals in the USA to take a stand against the 'war on terror'. This is all politically stimulating stuff. But the plot is slack at times and identification with the central narrator slow to develop. Gripping as the historical developments were, a novel has to draw you inside the story and make you part of it and for much of the time the reader is an onlooker. Writers of historical fiction sometimes overcome this problem by intertwining a parallel plot line with the history -27 often of a romantic nature: double-crossing and the like. Kingsolver avoids any such short cut, instead creating a protagonist who's lack of love substance as a character, the reader only cares for him Imperfect it may be but this is very brave for a well-established novelist. Choosing to foreground Trotsky in navigating a chunk of North American's most controversial history is not a sure root to commercial success. I doubt the Fourth International has featured in a major work of reworking of "the American century" depicted through the lives of the marginalised rather than the masses that's worth the read. The judges of this year's Orange Prize certainly
Review: Lacuna
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