The Lacuna
By Barbara Kingsolver
Faber £18.99, 528 pages
FT Bookshop price: £15.19

The Lacuna is an intriguing title, bound up with notions of loss, of gaps in the story; a lacuna also refers to the missing piece of a manuscript. However, from the hyperbolic opening line: “In the beginning were the howlers”, and the word “bellowing” in the next, we realise that, stylistically at least, this will not be a novel of ellipses or restraint.

Barbara Kingsolver’s first novel since Prodigal Summer, published in 2000, is broad in scope and ambition. Kingsolver keenly explores the links between big historical events and individual lives, and at its best, as in The Poisonwood Bible, her writing moves easily between the two. In this book, she ranges across the early years of the Mexican Revolution, through the Depression, the second world war and the cold war.

The novel is told through the posthumous journals of Harrison Shepherd, an aspiring writer of historical romances. He is half-Mexican, half-American. These journals are interspersed with letters and real newspaper accounts from the time. Shepherd finds himself, like a literary Forrest Gump, always in the frame with the famous, most notably with the Mexican painters Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo, and later as secretary to Russian revolutionary-in-exile Leon Trotsky. Through these characters and the collision of lives, Kingsolver hopes to show us the workings of history and attempts to call standard versions of the cold war experience and communism to account.

Kingsolver has done her research, and it shows. Every detail of every decade is faithfully chronicled and recorded, rather than evoked. Howard Hughes lands a light plane, inadvertently causing the death of Shepherd’s mother. Shepherd himself lives not far from a hospital that houses Zelda Fitzgerald. The kidnap of Lindbergh’s baby is mentioned, and so on. The result is a relentless pop-cultural history lesson.

In terms of characterisation, the women come off better than the men. Kingsolver catches well the volatility of Salome, Shepherd’s mother, the earthiness of Frida Kahlo, the strange speech rhythms of the archivist Violet Brown. The major male figures – Diego, Trotsky, and Shepherd himself – speak in a highly stilted register and are virtually indistinguishable. Shepherd has no interior life; he is a cipher for ideas about America and the cold war. Curiously, despite his time in Mexico with famous communists, we get little sense of his own politics, nor any real emotional response concerning his closet homosexuality. Diego sounds like a character from Henry James. Here he is on Lenin: “He did what was best for his people, until death. All the while living in a rather cold little apartment in Moscow.”

Kingsolver’s writing pulls in two directions. For the most part, the style is dense and simile-laden. At other times she achieves a spare and heart-breaking lyricism. In The Poisonwood Bible, the former was tempered by the virtuoso voices of the preacher’s family in the Congo. She vividly evoked place and time and skilfully entwined the personal and the political. The biblical structure allowed for the occasional portentous passage. There was a tendency to lecture the reader on history, but overall the language was more honed and the excesses reined in.

Here though, we do not get under the skin of history. The intention is admirable but the politics are naïve. Everything is black and white. Trotsky is presented uncritically as the saviour of the Russian revolution. Stalin is bad. Trotsky is a benign force in exile: “Lev has a large heart. He’s father to the whole world, it seems.” Anyone with a little left history knows that Trotsky delighted in conflict. He was dogmatic and ruthless as well as charming and urbane. This battle-worn intellectual is described as “a peasant leader of the peasant revolution”. This is unfathomable. The book trumpets its symbols and themes at every opportunity.

Shepherd becomes a famous novelist, famously undone by the cold war. He sends a review of his work to Kahlo: “Take it as proof I am no literary great, but ... it proves my books are about Important Things.” Kingsolver’s books are also, emphatically, about Important Things. Although she has a real gift for dialogue, setting and characterisation, here this skill is too often hostage to history.

Her purpose may indeed be to show that “any country is still in the making. Always. That’s just history, people have to see that.” But Kingsolver is so intent on her didactic mission that there is no space for a reader to make connections, to come to her own conclusions.

In this novel, sadly, information triumphs over imagination.

Meaghan Delahunt is author of ‘The Red Book’ (Granta)