THE GREAT DIVIDE

An anti-imperialist fairy tale about the building of the Panama Canal.

Henríquez’s novel begins in 1907, with work on the canal well underway, and reveals how its construction changes the lives of multiple characters of varying nationalities, classes, and races, each in Panama for their own reasons. Henríquez is skilled at juggling the many subplots. Among the central characters, Ada Bunting from Barbados is the stereotypical sentimental heroine. The biracial 16-year-old has come to Panama to earn money to save her ailing sister’s life; she gets a job nursing the sick wife of wealthy, idealistic, but emotionally stunted malaria researcher John Oswald (whose under-explored complexity makes him one of the book’s more interesting characters). Plucky Ada begins a tepid romance with young Panamanian Omar Aquino, whose broken relationship with his fisherman father Francisco exemplifies the divided loyalties and resentments of Panamanians treated as second-class citizens in their own country. Francisco sells to fishmonger Joaquín, whose wife ropes her husband into organizing a demonstration of passive resistance against Canal Commission orders to dismantle and move her entire hometown. A host of other characters are sketched in, from an Antiguan cook who undermines Ada to an inept French doctor, an intuitive palm reader, and a Barbadian sugar planter in love with Ada’s mother but too weak-willed to fight for her. Along the way, Henríquez plugs in the history that many North Americans probably don’t know: the Panamanian civil war and intervention by the United States, which paid the country, newly independent from Colombia, $10 million dollars for full control of the Canal Zone. The depiction of white North Americans and Caribbean planters as at best clueless, more often mercenary and cruelly racist, is undoubtedly accurate. Unfortunately, and despite Henríquez’s lyrical prose, they never feel fully realized as individuals. Neither does virtuous Ada, the noble Panamanians, or Mrs. Oswald, a representative of white female victimhood who has sacrificed her intellectual ambition for a loveless marriage.

Despite panoramic ambitions, the novel never quite catches fire.