Anna Hope’s fourth novel may begin in the cramped, sweaty confines of a van making its way through Mexico but its narrative sweep is capacious, straddling the experiences of a quartet of very different characters over more than200 years. It has ambition to match, musing on freedom and reciprocity, on the redemptive power of storytelling and the sustaining force of ritual. Climate anxiety features prominently, too, though it’s through the rock of its title that Hope strives to bind the book together.
According to Wixárika legend, the rock was the first solid object born on Earth. Or as Hope would have it: “Here was the place that formlessness first fell in love with form.” Located a few hundred metres off the coast of a sleepy-seeming backwater called San Blas, it remains a place of pilgrimage and its sacred potency has combined with strategic importance to provide an arresting, haunted history.
It’s this that Hope sets about bringing to life, demonstrating impressive stylistic verve as she shifts her focus from an English writer in the aforementioned van, journeying to the rock with her soon-to-be-ex-husband to give thanks for the birth of their child, to a Jim Morrison-esque singer in 1969, an indigenous girl taken there by force in 1907 and a young Spanish naval officer who loses his mind in 1775.
Eventually, these stop-start narratives return the reader to 2020, when Hope’s unnamed novelist, already kept awake at night by the climate emergency, realises she must now factor Covid into her fears of societal collapse. The characters who came before her turned to drugs, ancestral stories and faith in the face of crisis; what she has is belief in her young daughter. It is both not much and everything.
Despite the book’s disjointedness, there is plenty to admire, not least Hope’s determination to resist the consolations of narrative closure. Ultimately, however, The White Rock doesn’t quite manage to attain the solidity of the piedra blanca.
The White Rock by Anna Hope is published by Fig Tree (£14.99). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
