Been there, read that

Just as the monumental frescos of the Mexican artist Diego Rivera attempted to tell the story of his country, so too does another Mexican, Carlos Fuentes, look to history in this huge novel. This is yet another of those formula narratives, spanning a century, drawing on a cast of hundreds including many famous names such as Rivera and his colourful spouse, the iconic artist Frida Kahlo, as well as the stock idealists and losers against the stage curtain of Nazism, the Spanish Civil War, the tyranny of Hollywood, witch-hunting McCarthyism, Mexico City earthquakes and Mexican politics - all centred around one character, in this case Laura, a beautiful if restless woman. Fuentes presents an overview of 20th-century world history with particular reference to events in Mexico. It is all very predictable, slow-moving but also too neatly episodic.

Curiously this has far less to do with Fuentes, here at his most workmanlike and least subtle, than it does to the limitations of the tired conventions of faction - history-bound fiction, a genre long exhausted by Irving and Doctorow and others, including Fuentes. It is as if the reader already knows too much before he has even begun his tale.

There are too many echoes of his better city novels such as The Death of Artemio Cruz(1962). From the opening pages The Years with Laura Diaz has the tone of a performance. It is also a curiously impersonal work. Despite having her life, dreams, passions and pain presented in detail before us with the clarity of a medical chart, Laura - sister, bored wife, semi-detached mother, wanderer and narrative device - never fully emerges as a real character.

As a novelist, Fuentes has always preferred the panoramic to the intimate, which is a pity because his finest fictions such as the Jamesian Aura (1962), The Good Conscience (1986) and the collection Constancia, and Other Stories for Virgins (1990) are strange, intense and personal. When he opts for the epic, which he does here, the result is overstated, archly cinematic, bloated and far less convincing than the sense of time and place achieved in the five novellas that make up The Orange Tree (1994). There is often a lush, macho swagger about his prose, its laden sentences, its elemental self-possession, its need to make statements - "It was the moment of temptation. The moment when she experienced doubt".

Fuentes feels he has created a woman simply because he has allowed Laura to choose sexuality over duty. She remains a dream girl-woman at odds with herself and love, until predictably she realises she is old and can now concentrate on other things. Faster than the speed of light, near the close of the novel she becomes an ace photographer. Before this, however, she is given a powerful moment of self-realisation that admittedly sits uneasily with the characterisation of most of the previous 350 pages. Laura in addressing her absent lover Jorge, following the death of Santiago, one of her two adult sons, stares into the novelist's camera: "There comes a moment in life when nothing but loving the dead had any importance. We have to do everything we can for the dead. You and I together, we can suffer because the dead person is absent. Their presence is not absolute. Their absence is the only absolute. But the desire we have for the dead person is neither presence nor absence. There is no one left in my house, Jorge. If you want to believe my solitude is what returned to you, I give you permission to do so."

As the novel opens Fuentes announces "sometimes it's possible to touch memory". A family legend is evoked, the one "retold most often". In it a young German woman, newly arrived in Mexico as a mail order bride, is involved in a stagecoach robbery. A bandit ask her for her rings. She is not easily intimidated. "you'd have to cut them off me," she retorts. The thief does exactly that and slices off four fingers - and the rings. "She didn't even wince" - or so the legend maintains. That surreal moment lingers throughout the novel. Although the years flash by, and Laura the girl moves into old age and death, Fuentes ensures the narrative never loses its sense of the past that created it. But for all the grand gestures and flamboyance, this big novel says little. It achieves far less than its physical size promises and too often there's the feeling of having read much of it several times before.

Eileen Battersby is the Literary Correspondent of the Irish Times.