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A review by lisa_mc
Katherine Carlyle by Rupert Thomson
4.0
Can we have memories from before we were born? Katherine Carlyle feels she does: memories from her eight years frozen in storage as an embryo. Cold and dark, those eight years give her a worldliness and insight past what would be expected in a typical 19-year-old.
But Katherine -- who goes by Kit, or Misty, if the mood takes her -- is not a typical 19-year-old.
Motherless, rootless, fierce and independent, sometimes naive and stubborn, she’s on the cusp of adulthood, with a place at a prestigious university, but chooses -- more accurately, is driven by some internal force -- to wander across Europe and eventually to the Arctic.
Kit and her parents moved to Rome from Britain while her mother was fighting cancer, which she would ultimately not survive. Her father is a longtime foreign correspondent, rarely home. Kit is certain he blames her -- her clinical conception, her deliberate birth -- for the illness and death of her mother.
Before she is due to leave for university, Kit decides on another path. She just goes, not telling her father anything, trying to make him worry -- or to see whether he even misses her once he’s back from his latest assignment. She overhears a couple talking about a German friend of theirs, notes his name and heads to Berlin, engineering a “chance” meeting with him and insinuating herself into his life, briefly. From there, she leaves for Moscow, then north to Archangelsk, and finally on to a remote mining colony in the farthest frigid reaches of Russia: “nowhere at all, adrift in subzero waters, virtually unreachable during the winter months.”
Kit is not the most reliable of narrators, and at times we’re left wondering what actually happens and what’s in her head. She constructs an elaborate plan to inform her father of her whereabouts, and then imagines, with varying degrees of plausibility, the conversations he has with people she’s met along the way while he is looking for her. But this is much of the appeal of the story. We have no idea where it’s going or what to expect; we’re along for the ride with Kit, compelled to see it to the end.
Thomson’s writing is straightforward and well-paced while staying thoughtful. His vivid descriptions capture not only what’s being described, but the mood of Kit herself. German names are “truncated, harsh, almost greedy, like bites taken out of something crisp,” while Russian names are “polysyllabic, clumsy … like numb fingers trying to grasp something in the cold.”
A journey in a novel is typically a quest, an escape or a picaresque romp. Kit’s has elements of all of those. She’s searching for something, but she doesn’t really know what; she’s running from something, but it’s nebulous rather than specific; she has some interesting adventures with colorful people.
Kit is not as much trying to find herself as lose herself. “This is not, at heart, a physical journey,” she muses. “It’s more like a journey back in time -- or sideways, into another dimension. … My life is light and tidy now, like a rucksack that holds nothing but the bare essentials.” But what she loses -- and finds -- in the end wouldn’t have been possible without the journey.
But Katherine -- who goes by Kit, or Misty, if the mood takes her -- is not a typical 19-year-old.
Motherless, rootless, fierce and independent, sometimes naive and stubborn, she’s on the cusp of adulthood, with a place at a prestigious university, but chooses -- more accurately, is driven by some internal force -- to wander across Europe and eventually to the Arctic.
Kit and her parents moved to Rome from Britain while her mother was fighting cancer, which she would ultimately not survive. Her father is a longtime foreign correspondent, rarely home. Kit is certain he blames her -- her clinical conception, her deliberate birth -- for the illness and death of her mother.
Before she is due to leave for university, Kit decides on another path. She just goes, not telling her father anything, trying to make him worry -- or to see whether he even misses her once he’s back from his latest assignment. She overhears a couple talking about a German friend of theirs, notes his name and heads to Berlin, engineering a “chance” meeting with him and insinuating herself into his life, briefly. From there, she leaves for Moscow, then north to Archangelsk, and finally on to a remote mining colony in the farthest frigid reaches of Russia: “nowhere at all, adrift in subzero waters, virtually unreachable during the winter months.”
Kit is not the most reliable of narrators, and at times we’re left wondering what actually happens and what’s in her head. She constructs an elaborate plan to inform her father of her whereabouts, and then imagines, with varying degrees of plausibility, the conversations he has with people she’s met along the way while he is looking for her. But this is much of the appeal of the story. We have no idea where it’s going or what to expect; we’re along for the ride with Kit, compelled to see it to the end.
Thomson’s writing is straightforward and well-paced while staying thoughtful. His vivid descriptions capture not only what’s being described, but the mood of Kit herself. German names are “truncated, harsh, almost greedy, like bites taken out of something crisp,” while Russian names are “polysyllabic, clumsy … like numb fingers trying to grasp something in the cold.”
A journey in a novel is typically a quest, an escape or a picaresque romp. Kit’s has elements of all of those. She’s searching for something, but she doesn’t really know what; she’s running from something, but it’s nebulous rather than specific; she has some interesting adventures with colorful people.
Kit is not as much trying to find herself as lose herself. “This is not, at heart, a physical journey,” she muses. “It’s more like a journey back in time -- or sideways, into another dimension. … My life is light and tidy now, like a rucksack that holds nothing but the bare essentials.” But what she loses -- and finds -- in the end wouldn’t have been possible without the journey.