Fiction'Is this the way to Paradise?" The question, derived from a children's game, becomes a wistful refrain in Peruvian author Mario Vargas Llosa's latest venture into fictional biography.
For the Post- Impressionist artist, Paul Gauguin, and his grandmother, socialist campaigner Flora Tristan, the quest was for an earthly paradise. His was on a South Sea island where he could liberate himself from all civilised restraints and paint "as a savage"; Flora Tristan's pre-Marxist dream was of a world in which workers and women would defy exploitation and live in dignity, sobriety and harmony, singing a workers' union anthem.
Vargas Llosa's double narrative interweaves these two exceptional lives in alternate chapters which initially seem to emphasise their differences but cumulatively reflect and refract each other in unexpected ways. Grandmother and grandson, whose paths never crossed, shared qualities of courage, passion and stubbornness, of obsession even. Each endured extreme ill-health and penury and was often reviled. Rejection, in both cases, bolstered their sense of mission.
The sensitivity to place and period that graced Vargas Llosa's last historical novel, The Feast of a Goat, is here in abundance as he recreates early 19th-century working-class Paris. Here, Flora Tristan was born, illegitimately, to a French mother and a Peruvian father who died young. Her impoverished childhood ended with her marriage at the age of 16 to a brutal husband, whose sexual abuse of her turned her against sex for life (with men, at least) and fired her conviction that the institution of marriage enslaved women. When, after her third pregnancy, she took her children and ran away, she lived as a fugitive from the law and from her violent husband, eventually setting off alone on a hazardous voyage to Peru in search of an inheritance that never materialised.
The Way to Paradise opens as Flora embarks on a tour of France in 1844, campaigning relentlessly for workers' and women's rights and trying to establish a trade union, as advocated by her book, The Workers' Union. From this, the last year of her short life, the narrative loops back to her girlhood and her memorable sojourn among her father's relatives in Peru, in a series of occasionally awkward chronological shifts. Similarly, the opening chapter of the interwoven Gauguin narrative sees him travelling to Tahiti for the first time in 1891, while revisiting, in memory, earlier scenes of artistic breakthrough and crisis. The surprisingly clumsy temporal shifts are often introduced by a second-person narrative voice ("That was you, Florita, years ago"), which comments on events in a tone that is in turn rueful, patronising, or simply sententious: "things never succeed as well in this life as they do in dreams. A pity, Florita."
While it's impossible not to sympathise with Vargas Llosa's ambition to extend the formal possibilities of historical fiction, these ill-judged interjections ("this was great progress, Paul") seem only to cloud and clog the narrative without adding to its interest.
Perhaps the author was concerned about the reader's stamina for the grim monotony of Flora Tristan's self-punishing tour of the cities and towns of southern France. If so, he was right to be: it does become a grinding litany of rejection, repression and incomprehension. Laudable and impressive though Flora is, her interest pales beside that of the driven, infuriating, self-destructive artist whose struggles in Tahiti and later the Marquesan islands have been frequently caricatured but rarely so well illuminated.
The ecstatic creation of the painting, Manao Tapuapau/The Spirit of the Dead Watches (reproduced on the dust-jacket), which captures Gauguin's teenage Maori lover frozen in terror at an ancestral ghost; the appalling episode in Arles when his friendship with Van Gogh imploded; his suicide attempt as his eyesight failed and the syphilitic sores on his legs became unbearable - these experiences are vividly recreated here, culminating in a death scene that crystallises the elements of farce and pathos that characterised the artist's last days. The portrayal of this furious spirit flickering and fading, wrestling with his own extinction, is both moving and exhilarating. "Bravo, Paul!"
Helen Meany is a freelance journalist and editor
The Way to Paradise By Mario Vargas Llosa Faber & Faber, 373pp. £16.99