The book:
For our December book we have selected the ninth novel by award-winning author Rupert Thomson. A former candidate for the Guardian Fiction Prize, Thomson is a reassuringly original writer. Where many British writers - English writers especially - fall into a particular style, Thomson has a notably unique voice.
In the late 80s, Katherine Carlyle is created using IVF. Stored as a frozen embryo for eight years, she is then implanted in her mother and given life. By the age of nineteen Katherine has lost her mother to cancer, and feels her father to be an increasingly distant figure. Instead of going to college, she decides to disappear, telling no one where she has gone. What begins as an attempt to punish her father for his absence gradually becomes a testing-ground of his love for her, a coming-to-terms with the death of her mother, and finally the mise-en-scene for a courageous leap from false empowerment to true empowerment. Written in the beautifully spare, lucid and cinematic prose that Thomson is known for, Katherine Carlyle uses the modern techniques of IVF and cryopreservation to throw new light on the myth of origins. It is a profound and moving novel about where we come from, what we make of ourselves, and how we are loved.
What the Guardian thought:
The only certainty about a new Rupert Thomson novel – besides the clear, elegant prose – is that it will defy the expectations of his readers. Over the course of 10 novels, his breadth and variety of subject, style and genre has been so ambitious and seemingly effortless that it has made it difficult to fit any neat labels to his writing.
Katherine Carlyle is no less accomplished or ambitious, though it could not, at first glance, appear more different from his last, Secrecy, the story of a sculptor in 17th-century Florence. Katherine Carlyle also begins in Italy, though the story’s true point of origin is further back, in the lab of a London hospital.
Katherine, known as Kit, is 19 when she begins her narrative. She appears to live a privileged life in Rome, largely left to her own devices by her war reporter father; her friends are wealthy and attractive, and she is about to take up a place at Oxford. But she is haunted by absences. There’s the loss of her mother, who died when Katherine was 12; her father, constantly away working; her first love, from whom she has recently split and, most insistently, the strange absence implicit in her own beginning, detailed in the book’s prologue.
Katherine was created as an IVF embryo, then left frozen for eight years before being implanted in her mother. The idea of this limbo, these years in which she both did and did not exist, has created a lacuna in her sense of self, as she explains to a stranger: “‘Those frozen years, they’re still with me. They’re imprinted on my cells. On my DNA.’ I pause. ‘I’m actually made out of those years.’”
So she begins a quest for a deeper sense of meaning, by walking out of her life and “experimenting with coincidences”; a journey that takes her from Germany to Russia and further north, to the Arctic circle, a symbolic return to another frozen darkness, though her professed desire to disappear is really a cry for her father’s love and attention.
Journeys feature prominently in his books, and there’s something primal in Katherine’s restlessness, her desire to live “with a kind of freedom I never imagined”, that resonates deeply. But the novel is also careful to show that, for a young woman, the pursuit of liberty is always circumscribed; though she believes she is determining her own trajectory, at each new destination Katherine is noticed principally by men. Some help, others threaten, but all of them, it is implied, have ulterior motives; she cannot escape the way her youth, sex and isolation place her in relation to others.
Once again, Thomson has created a novel that resists easy categories, but remains with the reader long after the last page, asking profound questions about the way we choose to live and connect with others.
Stephanie Merritt - Read the full review
If you liked this, then try:
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The Little Red Chairs by Edna O’Brien
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The Past by Tessa Hadley
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Number 11 by Jonathan Coe
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