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Katherine Carlyle, known to her friends as Kit, would seem to be a golden girl. The daughter of a television reporter and a mother who died when Kit was fourteen, she has grown up in England and Italy, and has won a scholarship to Oxford to study French and Italian. She is nineteen.
Though Kit is to a degree aware of her privilege, she also suffers from an abiding sense of loss as a result of her mother's death and frequent bursts of anger at what she believes is her father's failure to become involved in her life. She sometimes attributes his distance to the feeling that he may blame her for her mother's early death. Kit was the product of in vitro fertilization with an added twist. The fertilized egg that would become Kit was not implanted immediately, but was kept frozen for eight years until a baby was wanted. Kit sometimes fancies that she is really twenty-seven years old. But more than that she vividly imagines her pre-life in the cryogenic vault, coming to consciousness of a sort every so often when the lid is taken off the vessel in which she and other frozen embryos sleep and then, when the lid is replaced, darkness again descends. Why did she languish so long in her frozen exile? What took her parents so long to bring her into full life? Was she really wanted by both and was she animated merely because her best-before date was fast approaching? Did her father keep her in her frozen prison because he wanted her mother all to himself? And, worst of all, was there something about this whole process that made her mother succumb to cancer?
The story begins in sunny Rome where Kit has been living for several years. Instead of taking up her place at Oxford, she takes the money her mother left her and begins a journey across Europe with the intention either of punishing her father for his indifference or of jolting him into a guilty awareness of her need.
At first she is directed by random chance. Odd bits and pieces that she finds, a scribbled telephone number, a hotel brochure, she takes as directives and she tries to follow where they lead. Gradually, however, her destinations become more deliberate as she heads ever further north, winding up at last in Arkhangel'sk, Russia and then in the northernmost city in the world, Longyearbyen in Svalbad, Norway. Along the way, she has assorted relationships with various men, most of whom behave better than we fear they will.
By no stretch of the imagination could one call this a crime novel. I opened it because I admired Thomson's last book, SECRECY, which was a remarkable historical thriller and murder mystery combined. But curiously, the enthusiastic blurbs which adorn its cover say things like "the story proceeds with perfect logic from mystery to mystery," and "written with the verve and detail of a spy novel." It may not technically be a crime novel, but it's not as far from it as you might think.
What it certainly is is a compulsive, hypnotic read. Kit is a wholly original character, at once a convincing late adolescent seeking adulthood, touching in her yearning for an absent parent and a strong, determined young woman who cannot be turned from her goal. Writing convincingly in her voice is a notable achievement for a sixty-year-old male. As well, it is written in an immaculate, lucid style that compels the reader to continue to the end of Kit's journey beyond the Arctic circle. Film fans may be reminded a bit of French cinema of the 60s and 70s.
It puzzles me that Rupert Thomson has not found the audience he deserves in North America. He is a brilliant observer of character and things; he knows how to propel a narrative forward without resorting to gimmickery; he has much that is important to say and he says it better than most. I urge you to read this book and any other of his you can lay your hands on. You will be glad you did.
YVONNE, § Yvonne Klein is a writer, translator, and retired college English professor who lives in Montreal.
Reviewed by Yvonne Klein, November 2015
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