Based on the author’s own family history, this continent-hopping novel chronicles the relentless march of time and the people swept up by it

The American novelist Claire Messud once suggested that, in our age of rapidly evolving technology, the desire to ask big questions through fiction “can seem quaint, or passé, or simply a little embarrassing”. Yet her latest novel — magnificent and multi-layered, hearty and heartbreaking — does not shirk from that challenge, even if it does so with the tenderest of touches.

Messud is perhaps best known for The Emperor’s Children (2006), a sharp study of power, privilege and failed promise among thirtysomething New Yorkers in the days before 9/11. Her seventh work of fiction, This Strange Eventful History is a generation-spanning, continent-hopping family saga whose protagonists — the Cassars — have trajectories that “hew closely to” those of the author’s own forebears, who were flung to the four corners of the earth in the aftermath of the second world war.

Where to start telling the tale, Messud wonders in a prologue: “this story — the story of my family — has many possible beginnings, or none . . . Any version only partial.” Armed with this caveat, readers are transported to June 1940. The Germans have conquered Paris. Gaston Cassar, French naval attaché in Salonica, Greece, hurriedly dispatches his family — devoted wife Lucienne, son François and daughter Denise — to safety in Algeria, his place of birth. But what can a naval attaché do when the country he represents no longer exists as he knew it?

The story then moves forward to the early 1950s. François, now a Fulbright Scholar in Massachusetts, has left Algeria behind and is uneasily embracing a new American life: “he felt like a raisin on top of a cake, extraneous. Endlessly fascinated, buoyed on waves of desire, he also felt much alone.” Even to fellow French expats, he realises, “he was foreign . . . a (mostly) white colonial African from that mysterious terrain across the Mediterranean”.

Still in Algeria, his sister Denise is studying law. Gaston, meanwhile, has given up his naval career and is working for a French oil company, but finds it unrewarding. “He’d bent and twisted himself into unseemly shapes, each time hoping against hope that this new role would carry him forward, open doors, afford opportunities to become part of ‘the new France’, the renascent France . . . [but] whatever France was becoming, it seemed — although he’d devoted his whole life to her — she had no place for him.”

A decade later, Algeria has gained independence, leaving the Cassars without a country to call home. In Toronto, we are introduced to the strong-willed Barbara, who, after falling madly in love (or lust?) with François, has married him against her parents’ wishes. But the shared sense of being outsiders that first bound them together is soon a wedge: “she’d actually married someone whose relationship to the known world . . . would always be . . . askew, at an uneasy angle.”

Meanwhile, Denise is also struggling to adapt to the expat life, this time in Argentina: she “considered it at once as her real life and not quite real, as if it unfolded in parallel with an alternate French life — darker, damper, lonelier, more gruelling — that she might instead have been condemned to lead”. As she tries to crack the conundrum of “how to reconcile being French and not French at the same time”, there are hints of her profound mental anguish — an attempted suicide, lithium.

Then comes another move — this time to Australia. In 1970s Sydney, François is working for a multinational mining company. Barbara, again enjoying university life, is trying not to feel encumbered by her marriage and her two daughters, Loulou and Chloe — the latter a version of Messud herself. She feels trapped, but resigned: “She would never leave, would not, could not, break free of all that tied her. She would have to work within the limits of the possible; she hadn’t the ruthlessness to do otherwise.”

It is Chloe, the daughter who will grow up to be a writer, who finds herself uncovering — and entrusted with — the family’s deepest secrets. Just as it was the discovery of a long-buried family story, as Messud’s prologue explains, that sparked this expansive and humane work of autobiographically inspired fiction: “the secrets and shame, the ineffable shame that in telling their story I would wish at last to heal. The shame of the family history, of the history into which we were born.”

The novel gallops onwards towards the first decade of the 20th century, by which point the pages, once richly populated with finely drawn characters, begin to be filled instead by absences and silences, death bringing the family together while tearing it apart. Flowing swiftly between characters, places and times, the novel is narrated mostly in the third person. Only Chloe gets to speak in her own voice, an indication of her closeness to the author’s personal perspective.

This Strange Eventful History firmly disproves the glib adage that all happy families are alike but each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way. Familial happiness and unhappiness, the Cassars show us, are inextricably linked, our greatest loves forever tethered to our greatest regrets. This is a novel about the relentless march of history, and about the individuals — present yet powerless — who are swept up by it. Ultimately, it is a novel about loss — of a country, of an identity, of memory, of love — and about what happens when the people who have borne witness to our lives finally disappear.

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This Strange Eventful History — Claire Messud’s magnificent, multi-layered saga