The Rapture: Liz Jensen
GABRIELLE Fox, with a line in deadpan Chandleresque humour, is in a wheelchair, the result of a terrible car accident.
Attempting to rebuild her life and career as a psychologist she relocates to a town in southern England and begins work at an adolescent secure psychiatric unit where among her other duties she is assigned to a psychotic teenager called Bethany Krall, daughter of an evangelist preacher, who killed her own mother by stabbing her in the eye with a screwdriver.
The weather in this near-future is weird.
A blistering summer is accompanied by a series of extraordinary natural disasters across the world, made even more disturbing because the intuitive nutcase Bethany foresees them.
Or does she actually cause them? Is there a rational explanation for her predictions?
Or should we be really scared?
Apocalyptic novels are often weak on characterisation as if the minutiae of human interaction is of little importance when we are dealing with imminent global wipe-out.
But Liz Jensen keeps our interest in the characters burning steadily.
Even when Armageddon is staring them in the face they are still capable of love, jealousy and salty humour.
Gabrielle’s new relationship with a physicist called Frazer Melville is still a matter of angst and joy as it would be even if the world wasn’t about to end. Will he be put off by her disability?
Can she still have a proper sex life? (yes is the answer). Is his disappearance down to the fact that he is off saving the planet or is he just off with his Icelandic ex-girlfriend?
Gabrielle’s relationship with Bethany – that old psychiatrist/patient staple – is you might say… highly charged (Bethany is dangerously addicted to electro-convulsive therapy which accentuates her cataclysmic visions).
With a reckless disregard for political correctness she also calls her paraplegic psychiatrist Wheels and comments unceasingly on Gabrielle’s personal life as though she can read her mind.
Add to this volatile mix a scary scientific theory, an environmental guru and a fundamentalist Christian belief (the Rapture of the title) that those who are to be saved will be swept off to heaven before the apocalypse.
Paced like a thriller with elements of sci-fi, the supernatural and old-fashioned romance this is a highly original yarn with a serious undertow that pulls its schlock-horror elements into something that is genuinely thought provoking and disturbing.
Bloomsbury, £16.99
