The Panama Canal changes more than just trade routes in ‘The Great Divide’
THE GREAT DIVIDE By Cristina Henríquez Ecco, 336 pp., $30
The construction of the Panama Canal has been well documented. However, as is often the case when it comes to grandiose engineering feats, the lives of those who worked on it doing menial tasks, those who died while working on it, and those who were affected by it in different ways have received far less attention. Cristina Henríquez’s “The Great Divide” changes that. The Panama Canal is the backdrop of this novel, but the people around it — workers from a variety of countries, doctors, supervisors, business owners, activists — are the focus, and their narratives reveal the personal, economic, and cultural impact of the birth of one of the most important waterways in the world.
Throughout the 1800s, many of the British and American companies doing business between the Atlantic and the Pacific coasts wanted to find ways to get their ships full of goods from one place to another more expeditiously. Finally, in May of 1904 and under the supervision of President Theodore Roosevelt, the United States began to dig out and then build a trans-isthmian canal in Panama that would connect the Atlantic Ocean with the Pacific. The project required a lot of people, and the influx of workers impacted Panama in many ways, as Henríquez demonstrates.
For Francisco, a local fisherman raising his son alone after losing his wife, the American presence is unwelcome. Unfortunately, his son Omar sees it as an opportunity to get a good job as well as a purpose in life, creating a rift between them. For John Oswald, an American scientist, the engineering project provides a perfect opportunity to make a name for himself by eradicating one of the worst problems affecting the construction of the canal: malaria. For Ada Bunting, a young girl from Barbados who runs away from home in the middle of the night and makes her way to Panama as a stowaway, the country’s flourishing economy presents a chance to make the money her beloved sister needs for a surgery which their mother can’t afford.
While “The Great Divide” centers around Ada, Omar, Francisco, and John, it also presents the tales of their families as well as those of a large cast of secondary characters that come in and out of the narrative, some of them illuminating different corners of history. For instance, the lives of Millicent, Ada’s sister, and Henry Camby, the white man — Ada and Millicent’s father — who has spent years in love with Ada’s mother, highlight the reality of many forbidden interracial relationships in the late 1800s.
Despite the plethora of characters and intertwining narratives, “The Great Divide” is always clear and engaging, and Henríquez weaves every story together to create a tapestry that captures the promise and excitement that surrounded the construction of the Panama Canal — but also the injustices, problems, grief, misogyny, dangers, and colonialist biases of the time. The Panama Canal helped many, and hurt many. Scores of workers died or were grievously injured in the construction process, men “crushed by rocks; men maimed by the swinging arms of steam shovels; men whose legs had been severed from their torsos by barreling trains; men burned by a live wire.”
Still others were displaced, which is something Henríquez explores here through the lives of the residents of Gatún, who are forced to abandon their town before it disappears under water.
The array of languages, voices, stories, and cultures in this book is phenomenal, spanning the rich, the poor, the sick, and the powerful. The characters come from Panama and Barbados, but also from the United States, Jamaica, and Trinidad. Some characters in Henríquez’s engaging narrative dream and fight for a better future, but the past is always present here, and the ghosts — some metaphorical and some literal — of bygone things and people are never too far from mind. Henríquez’s deft and capacious imagination also offers critiques of racism and misogyny without tipping over into preachiness. Ada, whose mother teaches her daughters that no woman should ever depend on a man, ends up working as a caretaker for a wealthy man’s sick, bedridden wife; the men she encounters mostly share the same thoughts on women: “A woman might be moved to share her opinions with a diary, but she should not share them with the rest of the world.”
Great historical fiction has to be gripping to work, fusing fact and fiction to deliver information while still keeping readers glued to the pages and invested in the characters. Henríquez accomplishes that and much more here, delivering a sweeping epic that shines a light on the small but very significant kind of stories that were lost in the shadow of a monumental construction.