The Great Divide – A book review by Sarah Nicholson

Sometimes you come across a great book by chance, in this instance I found it when scrolling on the Borrowbox library app.

Sometimes you read a book and you have to share it with everyone because it is so well written and the theme of the novel is so topical.

The book in question is The Great Divide by Cristina Henriquez. I listened to it and the narration is excellent, with distinctive accents for each character. Although as with “listening” to any book I did struggle to work out who was who at the beginning, without the benefit of flicking back a few pages to clarify, but it was well worth persevering.

According to Wikipedia “the most common meaning [of The Great Divide] is the Continental Divide of the Americas, which separates the watersheds of the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans”.

The novel is set in Panama in 1907 at the time when the Panama Canal was built, a construction which crosses the Great Divide and divides a country in the process.

Panama has often been in the news recently but, I confess it’s not somewhere I know very much about. Henriquez does though, her father emigrated from Panama to the US in the early 70s and she spent many summers there.

Most of her writing is about the country and its people. However while studying for her MFA she didn’t submit those stories, but chose to focus on stories set in the US as she deemed them somehow more suitable. Already we can see the cracks forming between what is and what isn’t acceptable, even if it is only perception.

And that is the real premise of the novel, there are divisions everywhere, not just the thin stretch of land between the seas, or the canal that will eventually divide Panama in two, but there are huge divisions between rich and poor, black and white, men and women, the gold houses and the silver houses  

“Everything in the canal zone… was divided on the basis of silver and gold. 

Gold meant the Americans and silver meant [everyone else].”

This book explores this diversity, often quite subtly. Some comments on Goodreads say the book has very little plot, but it is a character driven novel.

There is Ada, a 16-year-old who has travelled from Barbados with only 3 gold crowns to her name – you find out much later in the book where they have come from and I’m not about to spoil that. She is looking for work to pay for an operation for her sister.

“in Panama, everyone said finding work was as easy as plucking apples from trees”

Many people have travelled there for work, often the hard manual labour of digging out the canal. John and Marian Oswald are different, they are a white American couple, arriving in Panama so John can work with the local board of health helping eradicate malaria.

It transpires that his wife is also a scientist, but her academic achievements are disregarded. When she becomes ill, she is confined to her bed and Ada is employed as her nurse. Despite their great differences in social status a bond develops between them.

There are locals, Franciso, a fisherman who is no longer speaking to his son Omar. Omar wants a very different life from his father and is working on the canal. Francisco believes the project is

“A delusional dream. Putting not one but two oceans in a place

where for a million years there had only been land.” 

Meanwhile Valentina and Joaquin learn their home village of Gatun is threated, it needs to be relocated so the land can be flooded to create a dam. Valentina is dismayed and organises a protest. Her neighbours join in and eventually there is quite a crowd but it is not seen by the great and powerful who could halt the project.

There is one lone photographer, a very minor character called Molly who has a camera

“About the size of a loaf of bread…She thought she might like to be a journalist one day”

She seizes her opportunity to take photos of the demonstration and life in an ordinary Panamanian village, only to be told by the newspaper editor, they are

“not right for the Record”

They don’t require stories about ordinary people.

How much history is lost because it is deemed unimportant and not newsworthy?

At least these days there is more chance to tell the inconsequential stories, we all have phones with cameras, we can document what happens.

I’d like to read more of Henriquez’s novels. She writes well and has much to say about real places I may never get the chance to visit. But I can understand her characters, they are motivated by real concerns, with hopes and dreams.

We may live in a world where much divides us, but people have so many similarities too – that’s what we should strive to find.