TITLE: The Rapture
AUTHOR: Liz Jensen
GENRE: Fiction, Literary Thriller
PUBLISHED: 2009
RATING: ★★★★★
PURCHASE LINKS: Amazon
MOBILISM LINK: Mobilism
Review: Jo Walton calls it the suck fairy: when your memory of a book (or movie or experience) exceeds its reality. With your re-read, you hope to recapture the magic you felt on that first read (view, experience), only to discover that you should have treasured the memory.
Such was my concern - nay, fear - as I pulled Liz Jensen's, The Rapture, off the shelf for my second read. I knew already its story: What would you do if someone, who had accurately predicted the dates of a series of natural disasters, told you the date of "the big one"? And what if that same person were a psychotic teenager (Bethany Krall) who had murdered her mother? And whose visions / predictions came as a result of Electro-Convulsive Therapy? And what if you lived in a time, soon after the London Olympics of 2012, in which global warming was an incontestable fact that gripped the world in religious fervor of the "end days"? You could shrug off such pronouncements as the ravings of a seeming lunatic, caged in a psychiatric hospital. You would be wrong.
The novel begins with a brooding sense of eeriness and foreboding...
That summer, the summer all the rules began to change, June seemed to last for a thousand years. The temperatures were merciless: thirty-eight, thirty-nine, then forty in the shade. It was heat to die in, to go nuts in, or to spawn. Old folk collapsed, dogs were cooked alive in cars, lovers couldn't keep their hands off each other. The sky pressed down like a furnace lid, shrinking the subsoil, cracking concrete, killing shrubs from the roots up. In the parched suburbs, ice-cream vans plinked their baby tunes into streets that sweated tar. Down at the harbour, the sea reflected the sun in tiny, barbaric mirrors. Asphyxiated, you longed for rain. It didn't come. But other things came, seemingly at random. The teenage killer, Bethany Krall, was one of them. If I didn't know, back then, that turbulence obeys specific rules, I know it now.
I knew on my first read that I would enjoy the novel based solely from its opening sentence (above); I knew from the first paragraph's final sentence that this book is special. Note, for example, the conflation of "all rules began to change" and "turbulence obeys specific rules," which creates a paradox. (And of which I will say no more to keep this review free of spoilers.) The story continues as the world's concerns mount...
The latest projections predict the loss of the Arctic ice cap and a global temperature rise of up to six degrees within Bethany's lifetime, unless drastic measures are taken now. I should be grateful to be childless. Just as the Cold War figures heavily in the fantasies of elderly mental patients, climate-apocalypse paranoia is common among the young. Zeitgeist stuff: the banality of abnormality.
I tried valiantly to pace my reading speed on that first read 3 years ago; I failed miserably. Breathless from turning pages as rapidly as I could read them to learn what happens next, the novel's first 10-15 pages fly by, showy-exciting for Jensen's auctorial style: They command your attention, yes, but they also demand it. Read too quickly, and miss something crucial. As excellent as the opening 10-15 pages are, though, it is the other 300 pages that truly tickle your mind. The story thrills, its characters engage you, its setting horrifies, and its style... Oh, its style. Wow. (Despite the quirk that the novel's narrator and protagonist, Gabrielle Fox, often speaks parenthetically, haltingly; her sentences and thoughts interrupted with digressions, and those digressions often interrupted by even more digressions.) Jensen has something to say, but she does not want it to get in the way of her story. The book's style settles down from those early pages, or the reader gets used to it - even while Jensen hurriedly builds her world, the novel's setting; as much a character as Gabrielle Fox or Bethany Krall...
Then I'd wake. I'd lie there, my upper body still sweating, the mail-order fan strafing the air across my naked skin, and let the new day infiltrate in stages. The last stage, before I rose to wash and dress and fight my tangled hair, like someone emerging from a date-rape drugging, would be the one in which I'd dutifully count my blessings. This folksy little ritual stayed brief, because the way I saw it, they didn't add up to much. When the skies finally broke, it felt biblical, megalomaniacal, as though orchestrated from on high by an irate Jehovah. On the coasts, cliffs subsided, tipping soil and rubble and silt on to the beaches, where they lodged in defiant heaps. Charcoal clouds erupted on the horizon and massed into precarious metropolises of air. Out at sea, beyond the grey stone bulwarks of the port, zigzags of lightning electrocuted the water, bringing poltergeist winds that sucked random objects up to whirl and dump. Passionate gusts punched at the sails of struggling boats and then headed inland, flattening corn, uprooting trees, smashing hop silos and storage barns, whisking up torn rubbish sacks that pirouetted in the sky like the ghostly spirits of retail folly. Maverick weather was becoming the norm across the globe: we'd all learned that by now, and we were already frustrated by its theatrical attention-seeking, the sheer woe of its extremes. Cause and effect. Get used to the way A leads to B. Get used to living in interesting times. Learn that nothing is random. Watch out for the tipping point. Look behind you: perhaps it's been and gone.
I cannot betray that much of the story's reality is found fractally: word by word, line by line, sentence by sentence, paragraph by paragraph. Words and sentences seemingly included only for effect, but carry so much more weight than that. By the time we read its final page we realize the novel exceeds the limitations of plot, character, setting, and big ideas (and they are mighty big ideas indeed!). In fact, The Rapture transcends all these boundaries handily, just as it transcends genre conventions (thriller, suspense, end of the world times, religious looniness, etc) and becomes something different, something better; wholly singular, sui generis.
No stretch, after my first read, to place The Rapture among the top 100 novels I have ever read. Exciting, thrilling, intelligent, brilliant. Compulsively readable, a barn-burning page turner.
But what about that suck fairy? Does the novel stand up against the ravages of time and memory? Yes, absolutely yes. In fact, after re-reading the novel, I now place it among the Top 5 (contemporary) novels I have ever read; on a short shelf alongside The Epicure's Lament, Moon Tiger, and The Gospel of Judas (to name three).
In retrospect, now that I know its story/plot, I can discern the masterpiece Liz Jensen achieves; each word chosen with extreme care, each sentence crafted with attention to the whole. Oddly, after re-reading, it seems she finished a final draft, and then wrote over the completed first draft as though it were a palimpsest, changing each word and entire sentences so that they could divulge what really occurs, if you pay close attention, while simultaneously concealing everything.
Readers who prefer books that elicit a frisson of excitement, terror, erudition; who enjoy novels with compelling and intelligent characters, who speak to each other intelligently, and whose decisions -- good and bad, right or wrong -- are made for organic and true reasons; who seek page-turning readability are the audience for The Rapture. Does that description fit you? You now know which book to read, if yes.
"Part literary ecological disaster, part critique about the dangers of evangelical religion, this is a pace imaginative novel, full of twists and turns, that deserves to be read in one sitting." ~Kate Mosse