The way to paradise

Might it be possible, for once, to judge Mario Vargas Llosa's novel by its cover? Exotically curled around the spine of the book is a striking reproduction of Paul Gauguin's masterpiece, Manao Tupapau, a disturbingly voyeuristic vision of the painter's adolescent Maori lover, tormented in her sleep by ancient Tahitian demons.

Gauguin lived the kind of life that even his literary idol, Victor Hugo, would be hard-pressed to invent: a sailor, stockbroker and Sunday-painter who, in his mid-30s, abandoned his bourgeois wife and family to rediscover the primitive in himself; first in Brittany, where his best friend made a present of his ear, before booking a passage to French Polynesia on an outward ticket to disaster. Romantic novelists and film-makers have rehashed and travestied this story ever since. What is remarkable is the transformation when an unromantic novelist such as Vargas Llosa takes over.

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It was perhaps inevitable that the greatest living Peruvian novelist should be attracted to Gauguin, as the painter himself spent his formative years in Peru. Surprisingly, Vargas Llosa glosses over this childhood period, as his chief interest lies in the strange combination of stasis and inspiration Gauguin experienced in Tahiti. Having travelled to the South Seas, Gauguin did not paint what he saw so much as express his frustration with what he found. His putative paradise was not quite as simple as he imagined. Rather than an untramelled Eden, Tahiti turned out to be a decadent colonial backwater - the first time Gauguin plunged naked into a stream, a gendarme popped up and charged him with offending public morality.

Vargas Llosa wryly dramatises this and many similar instances of Gauguin's troubles in Tahiti - not least the fact that he meekly accepted minor bureaucratic office in the colonial administration to pay his hospital bills. But where the novel really flares into life is in the fleeting descriptions of the creative process - the maddeningly unpredictable moments when Gauguin briefly found what he had been looking for.

Chief among these is the exceptional passage devoted to the creation of Manao Tupapau, where we become party to the precise moment at which the painter strikes a match and surprises his lover in the midst of her nightmare: "The sight would persist in his memory as one of those privileged, visionary moments of his life in Tahiti, when he seemed to touch and live, though only for a few instants, what he had come in search of in the South Seas, the thing he would never find in Europe, where it had been extinguished by civilisation."

All of this would be fine as it stands, though Vargas Llosa goes further by interweaving it with the parallel history of the painter's grandmother, the social revolutionary, Flora Tristan. A Peruvian-French proto-feminist and trade unionist, Tristan's career marked her out as the continental Mary Wollstencraft. In her opening sentence she makes clear the extent of her ambition: "Today you begin to change the world, Florita", and spends the rest of the novel trying to live up to it. Tristan drove herself into an early grave - in 1844 at 41 - through her ceaseless determination to preach the doctrine of workers' and women's rights, on a punishing schedule of public meetings throughout industrial France.

There is some ironic black comedy along the way - Tristan instigated a farcical competition to compose a new anti-bourgeois national anthem, which suggests that as well as her innovative, pre-Marxist form of socialism, she might also be credited with inventing the Eurovision Song Contest. But much of her progress is remorselessly bleak; particularly when, hounded by her abusive, estranged husband, she flees for Peru in search of an elusive inheritance which fails to materialise.

This difficult journey back to one's roots marks an interesting development from Vargas Llosa's previous