Just off the Pacific coast of Mexico, at San Blas in Nayarit, the White Rock juts up out of the sea. For the Wixárika people, who call it Tatéi Haramara or Mother Ocean, it is a sacred place. According to Wixárika cosmogony, when time began and there was nothing but boiling water covering the earth, the rock was the first solid object to be born and the origin of all life. For thousands of years the Wixárika have made pilgrimages to the site to offer sacrifices and to give thanks.
In Anna Hope’s fourth novel, The White Rock, this hallowed place is the fulcrum for four loosely connected narratives. Opening in 2020 with the story of a British writer whose faith in the future, both personally and globally, is crumbling, the book travels backwards in time, first to the 1960s and a burned-out American rock star running from fame and the Feds, and then to the first decade of the 20th century as two sisters from the persecuted Yoeme tribe are seized from their mountain village and shipped south to be sold as slaves. Hope’s fourth story chronicles the breakdown in 1775 of a Spanish naval lieutenant as he prepares to sail north on a mission to map the coast of California and claim new territories for his king. Like an inverted version of David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas, the narrative then arcs around, retracing its steps through each story on its way back to the writer’s present tense.
As Hope makes clear in an author’s note, this is a deeply personal book. Like the nameless writer in the novel, and after many years of trying unsuccessfully to conceive, Hope and her husband took part in a shamanic ceremony in which they were encouraged to pray for a child. Within months she was pregnant. When her daughter was two, she returned with her family to Mexico and the White Rock to present offerings of gratitude to the goddess Hamarara. It was while researching San Blas for her trip that she discovered the town’s complicated and troubled history. All the stories in the novel are inspired by real events.
The White Rock grows out through the gaping holes in those records. To whom those fragments of stories rightfully belong is a question raised at the outset by the unnamed writer, who wonders uneasily whether she has any right to “take the raw matter of history, the pain and the trouble and the incalculable loss” of others and “shape it into story, the hope of profit”. How different is it, the writer asks, from claiming the lands of Indigenous peoples and plundering their gold?
Perhaps this is Hope’s propitiatory offering to the contemporary gods of cancellation because, despite her obvious qualms, she goes on to do exactly that. In The White Rock her conflicted writer is only the latest in a long line of looters: just as the Spanish colonial forces and later the Mexican and American capitalists laid claim to the Wixárikas’ ancestral lands, so the hippies of the 1960s take their ritual drugs for pleasure and their sacred totems as souvenirs. The writer in 2020 not only pilfers their stories, she exploits their “pristine seam of connection” with their gods to satisfy her own longing for a child. While the four sections are narratively unconnected, motifs recur: the terror of looming catastrophe, the relentless destructiveness of the human species, the redeeming power of love in all of its different forms. Presiding over them all is the White Rock, which manifests itself differently to everyone who sees it – to one character it resembles an eagle, to another a monster in pain, to a third a cowled and bearded Christ – and yet stands as a symbol of something eternal and profound, a source of healing beyond the limits of human experience.
Hope is a precise and perceptive writer who draws the reader deep inside the worlds of her characters. Perhaps inevitably in a novel of this structure, some parts succeed more fully than others. The confrontation between two naval officers in 1775 packs a powerful emotional punch while posing provocative questions about the age of reason; the drug-fuelled exploits of the often unlikable rock star unravel with an audacious, almost reckless momentum that seduces entirely. By contrast, in spite of – or perhaps because of – Hope’s sensitivity around appropriation, the tragic story of the captured Yoeme sisters feels less assured, lacking the fearless clarity of characterisation that marks out the other narratives and makes them feel so strikingly fresh.
The White Rock remains a deeply satisfying read, an exploration of how stories are always ending, often unhappily, and yet always begin again. We may struggle to find hope, Hope tells us, but it is there in the landscape, in faith and memory and ritual, in the ancient unchanging silences that persist beyond the relentless clamour of human pain and greed.
Just off the Pacific coast of Mexico, at San Blas in Nayarit, the White Rock juts up out of the sea. For the Wixárika people, who call it Tatéi Haramara or Mother Ocean, it is a sacred place. According to Wixárika cosmogony, when time began and there was nothing but boiling water covering the earth, the rock was the first solid object to be born and the origin of all life. For thousands of years the Wixárika have made pilgrimages to the site to offer sacrifices and to give thanks.
In Anna Hope’s fourth novel, The White Rock, this hallowed place is the fulcrum for four loosely connected narratives. Opening in 2020 with the story of a British writer whose faith in the future, both personally and globally, is crumbling, the book travels backwards in time, first to the 1960s and a burned-out American rock star running from fame and the Feds, and then to the first decade of the 20th century as two sisters from the persecuted Yoeme tribe are seized from their mountain village and shipped south to be sold as slaves. Hope’s fourth story chronicles the breakdown in 1775 of a Spanish naval lieutenant as he prepares to sail north on a mission to map the coast of California and claim new territories for his king. Like an inverted version of David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas, the narrative then arcs around, retracing its steps through each story on its way back to the writer’s present tense.
As Hope makes clear in an author’s note, this is a deeply personal book. Like the nameless writer in the novel, and after many years of trying unsuccessfully to conceive, Hope and her husband took part in a shamanic ceremony in which they were encouraged to pray for a child. Within months she was pregnant. When her daughter was two, she returned with her family to Mexico and the White Rock to present offerings of gratitude to the goddess Hamarara. It was while researching San Blas for her trip that she discovered the town’s complicated and troubled history. All the stories in the novel are inspired by real events.
The White Rock grows out through the gaping holes in those records. To whom those fragments of stories rightfully belong is a question raised at the outset by the unnamed writer, who wonders uneasily whether she has any right to “take the raw matter of history, the pain and the trouble and the incalculable loss” of others and “shape it into story, the hope of profit”. How different is it, the writer asks, from claiming the lands of Indigenous peoples and plundering their gold?
Perhaps this is Hope’s propitiatory offering to the contemporary gods of cancellation because, despite her obvious qualms, she goes on to do exactly that. In The White Rock her conflicted writer is only the latest in a long line of looters: just as the Spanish colonial forces and later the Mexican and American capitalists laid claim to the Wixárikas’ ancestral lands, so the hippies of the 1960s take their ritual drugs for pleasure and their sacred totems as souvenirs. The writer in 2020 not only pilfers their stories, she exploits their “pristine seam of connection” with their gods to satisfy her own longing for a child. While the four sections are narratively unconnected, motifs recur: the terror of looming catastrophe, the relentless destructiveness of the human species, the redeeming power of love in all of its different forms. Presiding over them all is the White Rock, which manifests itself differently to everyone who sees it – to one character it resembles an eagle, to another a monster in pain, to a third a cowled and bearded Christ – and yet stands as a symbol of something eternal and profound, a source of healing beyond the limits of human experience.
Hope is a precise and perceptive writer who draws the reader deep inside the worlds of her characters. Perhaps inevitably in a novel of this structure, some parts succeed more fully than others. The confrontation between two naval officers in 1775 packs a powerful emotional punch while posing provocative questions about the age of reason; the drug-fuelled exploits of the often unlikable rock star unravel with an audacious, almost reckless momentum that seduces entirely. By contrast, in spite of – or perhaps because of – Hope’s sensitivity around appropriation, the tragic story of the captured Yoeme sisters feels less assured, lacking the fearless clarity of characterisation that marks out the other narratives and makes them feel so strikingly fresh.
The White Rock remains a deeply satisfying read, an exploration of how stories are always ending, often unhappily, and yet always begin again. We may struggle to find hope, Hope tells us, but it is there in the landscape, in faith and memory and ritual, in the ancient unchanging silences that persist beyond the relentless clamour of human pain and greed.