By the midway point of Hunger’s Brides’ almost 1,400 pages, the suspense is starting to build, not merely at a narrative level – what are the dark secrets of poet Sor Juana’s childhood? how will she survive the Mexican Inquisition? – but at the level of the novel itself. Would first-time novelist Paul Anderson really be able to pull it off, or would the impressive edifice he had constructed come crashing down in the last 100 pages (as so many books do)? Would we be forced to turn to someone like Samuel Johnson to summarize the experience, something along the lines of “It is not done well; but you are surprised to find it done at all”?

Dr. Johnson can rest in peace: Hunger’s Brides, one of the biggest gambles in recent Canadian publishing, is one of the most remarkable books in recent memory.

At its most basic, Hunger’s Brides is a multifaceted account of the life of the 17th-century Mexican poet and nun Sor Juana Inez de la Cruz. A child prodigy who charmed the Mexican court and became known as one of the finest poets in Christendom before entering a convent at age 19, Sor Juana (whose life has been chronicled previously, most notably by Octavio Paz) became a target of the Mexican Inquisition later in her life, and was tried for heresy only a year prior to her death.

This account of Sor Juana’s life is told from the papers of Beulah Limosneros, a graduate student who, in the early 1990s, develops an unsettling attachment to the poet, and who disappears into Mexico to retrace her life. Those papers, which include the Sor Juana narrative and a series of disturbing journals, are organized and edited by Don Gregory, Limosneros’s former adviser and lover, now a suspect in the vicious attack that has left her in a coma.

The three narrative strands – Sor Juana’s story, Limosneros’s journals, and Gregory’s account – interweave through the book, supplemented by letters, film scripts, Sor Juana’s poetry, interview transcripts, and other ephemera. At this level alone, the novel is impressive – the weaving of voices, which in other novels so often distracts from the narrative, serves instead to heighten the narrative tension. Readers will be hard-pressed to determine which, if any, is the main storyline, as the emphasis continually shifts.

More significantly, Hunger’s Brides is a taut, challenging novel of ideas. Anderson draws on history and mythology, church lore and folklore, psychology and cosmology, the complexities of theology and politics, to create a vibrant tapestry of belief and knowledge, and the considerable grey area between. Take, for example, Beulah’s bulimia: psychologically “explained” as the result of childhood trauma, it nonetheless contains mythic echoes of the story of Isis, vomiting the sun into creation (the line between mythology and psychosis is never clearly drawn), and resonates with the plague that claimed Sor Juana. The dozen years Anderson spent on the book are readily apparent on each page.

Even at over 1,300 pages (with an additional 30 pages of endnotes), Hunger’s Brides never feels too long. And the novel’s length is not the least of the risks Anderson takes. Techniques that shouldn’t work (the adopting of a film-script format for Sor Juana’s final interrogation, for example) seem natural and inevitable. Anderson’s focus on certain events (the lengthy description of Sor Juana’s childhood, for example) seems excessive at first – especially when compared with the cursory treatment given to her time at court or her early years in cloister – but the material becomes essential, every detail significant, as the thematic strands expand.

Anderson’s considerable skill and care also extend to the characterizations. In the Sor Juana passages, he deftly captures a clear sense of the enigmatic poet and her voice, drawing on the surviving texts to create a living character. His depictions of Limosneros and Gregory are equally fine and nuanced. Both characters emerge from the masks of their respective unpleasantness into sympathetic, conflicted, and rich vibrancy. Even supporting characters – from Sor Juana’s scribe Antonia and friend Don Carlos to a contemporary Mayan who befriends Limosneros to the CBC journalist who interrogates Gregory – are fully rounded.

Hunger’s Brides is not for everyone. It is an imposing, challenging work that requires a degree of both surrender and active participation on the part of the reader. In that challenge, however, Anderson’s debut stands proudly alongside such works as Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude and Eduardo Galeano’s Memory of Fire trilogy.