The White Rock

Anna Hope

Fig Tree, £14.99

 

REVIEW BY ROSEMARY GORING

A few hundred metres off the coast of Nayarit state in Mexico lies a craggy rock. Some think it looks like Jesus Christ, others have described it as a face with jagged teeth. For the Wixárika tribe, the White Rock of Anna Hope’s title is where life on earth began.

They believe this great lump was the first thing to emerge from the boiling sea. Since earliest times, for them – and many others – the rock has held a profound mythological and religious meaning.

In the opening chapter of Hope’s mesmerising novel, a writer thinks you might well ask why she, her toddler daughter, unfaithful husband and an assembly of strangers from across the world, are heading towards the rock in a van, in the stifling heat of early summer.

The answer is both simple and complex. After taking part in a shamanic ceremony three years earlier, the writer finally conceived a child: “This visit was non-negotiable. Having prayed for a child, their child having come, there was another side of the bargain.

“It did not involve money, or not directly. It involved sacrifice. It involved taking their daughter to Mexico to give thanks.”

The White Rock opens and ends with the unnamed writer’s visit. Her situation and outlook reflect the author’s life, Hope herself having undergone the same rituals that resulted in pregnancy and subsequent journey of thanksgiving. This far the novel draws on her direct experience. The rest of the tale, however, is a work of imaginative reconstruction, as she explores the history of this strategically significant rock, and the pivotal, often terrible, events that have taken place here.

There are four strands to this former actor’s fourth novel. Split into nine parts, it is told in a wave-like pattern that could be seen to replicate the seas washing up to the rock.

After the modern-day writer comes The Singer, who in 1969 escapes to San Blas, the town off which the White Rock lies. Hiding in a downbeat hotel, he tries to find some peace of mind, away from the clamorous demands of those around him: “They want Adonis, not Caliban. And they really, really want him to shave his beard and lose the weight.”

Although he too goes without a name, the parallels between his booze and drug-fuelled career as the world’s most famous rock star and the life of doomed Jim Morrison are unavoidable. Even in two short chapters, the fate that lies ahead of him is implicit.

The singer’s brief spell of freedom, while convincingly told, is the least compelling narrative. Where The White Rock takes off is in the most harrowing sections, which describe the capture in 1907 of two Yoeme girls by soldiers.

Dragged from their home, along with countless others, they are being shipped off to become slave workers in the Yukatán.

The forcible deportation of the Yoeme tribe in the early 20th century is now considered genocide, although for some, like me, this novel will be the first we’ve ever heard of it. Their removal, writes Hope, was “because of their resistance to the opening of their ancestral land – the largest, most fertile five valley in Mexico – to make way for Mexican and American venture capitalists.”

When one of their fellow captives aboard the ship bound for San Blas tells them they are now enslaved, they are aghast: “Slaves. This word falls between them, but does not settle: it thrashes like a fish on the deck.”

Stretching still further back, to 1775, Hope goes aboard the Spanish Empire’s fleet, where four highly trained navigators have been commanded to sail from the White Rock, a frontier post for Spanish colonial forces, to San Francisco Bay.

As the first European settlers to land there, they will claim it for the Empire. It is not a congenial posting, thinks one lieutenant, who has encountered spiders “as big as the palm of your hand.

With ticks that set up their home on your ball-sack and bloat obscenely with your blood.”

When one of the four captains begins to doubt their mission, he finds himself pitted against forces greater than one man can withstand.

Although the foundation of The White Rock is spiritual, the themes underlying it are far from abstract. Counterpointing key moments of history, Hope lays bare the barbarity and short-sightedness of colonial domination.

Also in her sights is the human addiction to destruction, of oneself or others. Not least of these victims is the planet, whose distressed state is the contemporary backdrop against which this novel plays out.

Among its many impressive elements is Hope’s handling of the past. There is no descent into archaisms or flowery embellishment. She seems equally at ease among boorish 18th-century naval cadets as in the company of an embattled rock idol.

Although a change in tone and language conveys each individual character, the tenor of the whole is seamless.

Her greatest talent, however, is in getting under the skin of her characters. In this her previous acting career is possibly discerned, as their voices become her own.

But she also recognises the physical details and sensations that convey period, mood and behaviour.

As the Yoeme captives grow parched for lack of water, “The girl’s tongue is fat and cracked, and squats in her mouth like a toad waiting for rain.” Recalling the days before their capture, she thinks of her sister, who was in love: “it is like her smile is made up of great big letters that spell his name”.

It is in the wretched girls’ tale that Hope expresses herself most lucidly and movingly.

Here too is where the heart of this novel beats hardest.

The various stories in the White Rock touch on those who came before or who will follow, creating a chain of sorts.

Part of a growing genre of anti-colonial fiction, which is rewriting assumptions about the past, there is a subtle plangency in this powerful portrait of human folly and ferocity. At present, it looks set to continue unchecked.