The concealer of virtue

The Lacuna By Barbara Kingsolver Faber, 507pp, $29.95

The Lacuna
By Barbara Kingsolver
Faber, 507pp, $29.95

MY dictionary defines lacuna as a gap or missing part, "as in a manuscript, series, or logical argument". However, its original 17th-century meaning is drawn from geography: lakes, lagoons, any natural declivity.

There are so many lacunae in Barbara Kingsolver's first novel since the highly successful The Poisonwood Bible in 1998 - physical, textual, political and biographical - that by rights the work should be more hole than substance. But, like any proper storyteller, Kingsolver knows that it is the fact withheld, the event passed over, the words unspoken that grip readers' imaginations and draw them in. Novelists are gods of the gaps.

To begin with, The Lacuna's narrative is assembled from flotsam and jetsam: textual debris in the form of diary entries, letters, newspaper articles and transcripts (some real, others invented), and a single chapter of autobiography - gathered and edited by Violet Brown, a middle-aged widow and secretary living in Asheville, North Carolina - from the papers of Harrison Shepherd, a bestselling author of historical potboilers, following his untimely death in 1951.

Although we don't know it at first, Violet is the one who has imposed a semblance of chronological order on this disparate material. When she introduces us to her former boss it is decades earlier, in the late 1920s, when the author is a boy on the verge of puberty, marooned on an island off the coast of Mexico, the unwelcome ward of an estate owner who is the lover of his wayward mother, Salome.

Salome is a Mexican who remade herself as a gringo during a North American sojourn with the Washington bureaucrat who is Shepherd's estranged father. She is "airtight, as the men used to say, copacetic, the cat's meow, a snake charmer". Glamorous, fun-loving and snobbish, yes, but also a "fire bell", meaning that she is still married to the DC accountant she left behind.

As such, her status in the staunchly conservative Mexican aristocracy falls somewhere between hostess and whore; and it is not long after this vivid, scene-setting opening that we see her reduced to a more precarious existence, kept by a series of boyfriends in Mexico City. Harrison, her clever, dreamy and bookish son, quiet and accommodating, possessed of an innocence unshaken by all the adult wickedness on display, is obliged by circumstance to make his way in the world earlier than most.

These sections, which take the boy from his lonely island paradise to the baroque squalor of Mexico's capital in the 1930s, and which describe abortive attempts at education, both south and north of the border, before Harrison finds his proper place in the employ of an artist named Diego Rivera and his partner Frida Kahlo, are seriously good.

Harrison may be pure invention but the milieu he observes is drawn with a firm grasp of the historical record and a sure sense of which facts best serve the fiction's course.

By this method, Kahlo is brought to magnificent life: feline in her cruelty and kindness, tempestuous always, broken bodily but fearless in word and deed. She comes to view her husband's former plaster-mixer and current cook as an ally, even an equal. When Soviet revolutionary Lev Trotsky comes to share his exile with the artist couple and ends up having a torrid affair with Kahlo, it is Harrison who becomes her go-between. In his new role as Trotsky's amanuensis and Spanish translator, he also becomes her household spy.

What Harrison gets from these world-bestriding figures is an education in passion and idealism that their subsequent betrayals never manage to dislodge. Frida can be vicious but she inspires pity and awe in her young charge; Trotsky may be an implacable revolutionary, steeled to violence and drenched in the blood of innocents, yet what Harrison will always recall is the man's faith in human nature, his boundless energy and his generous spirit. From him, Harrison learns that nothing wondrous can come in this world unless it rests on the shoulders of kindness.

Trotsky's murder, when it comes, is a blow from which Harrison never properly recovers; it is proof of an evil that threatens the gentle theology of peasant virtue and social equality that he has painstakingly designed. That the novel's second half should grow more scattered in terms of the sources from which it is constructed - letters to Frida, of course unanswered, and the diary notes of a new life begun in North Carolina as an uneasily assimilated small-town gringo - are of a piece with Harrison's broken state.

The irony of this move, away from the passion and fire of that notorious circle and to the more subdued and temperate country of his now-dead father, is that it finally provides him with the space for his own talents to show. His love of Mexico and its people shines through novels that, despite their vibrant exoticism and blood-curdling violence, enunciate an even, sceptical and anti-imperialist temperament that seems typically North American.

They turn out to be crowd-pleasers, bringing him a minor celebrity and a local woman, Violet Brown, willing and able to protect the increasingly private man from celebrity's more adverse effects.

Although Harrison is a character of uncommon clarity, pure of spirit without the usual corresponding insipidity or moral righteousness, inspiring love in those sensitive enough to notice his worth, Kingsolver's achievement here is to realise the limits to representation of such goodness. As the warm and self-sacrificing America of the war years succumbs to the paranoid spectacle of Joseph McCarthy's witch-hunts, Harrison Shepherd's success is just large enough to make him a target.

In the hysterical atmosphere, his CV alone marks him for destruction.

Harrison suggests at one stage that Cold War America has had a change of management. It is a stunning understatement, of course, and one that Kingsolver presumably believes to have repeated itself in recent years. Yet her evident fury at the co-option of liberty for coercive ends, the moronic simplicity of us-and-them, the corruption of her society's great civic virtues, never deforms the more subtle motions of character and story.

Like her modest hero, who one day simply vanishes into a cave beneath the Mexican waters, she intimates that decency doesn't disappear without a means of making its triumphant return.

Geordie Williamson is chief literary critic of The Australian.