Katherine Carlyle, Rupert Thomson: 'A gothic chiller with a modern twist', book review

Ever surprising, ever disquieting, Rupert Thomson has in his tenth novel imagined a contemporary Frankenstein

Rupert Thomson, English author, October 2015 in London (Micha Theiner)

Almost 200 years ago, Mary Shelley sat down in a villa beside Lake Geneva and wrote Frankenstein. It both starts and ends with the eerie, tragic pathos of her Arctic vision, as the distraught scientist pursues his fugitive “monster” through the ice north of Archangel in Russia.

Ever surprising, ever disquieting, Rupert Thomson has in his tenth novel imagined a contemporary Frankenstein. Katherine Carlyle, his heroine and narrator, is an IVF baby born only after waiting through an eight-year limbo at minus 196 degrees.

She evokes the embryo’s pre-natal suspension as “like being a ghost, only the wrong way round”. For all her comfort and opportunity as the gifted 19-year-old daughter of a globe-trotting TV reporter, a golden girl who lives in picturesque Rome and wins a scholarship to Oxford, Katherine – “Kit”, like some DIY self-assembly pack – still feels like “a freak, an experiment. A shell.” She thinks of herself as manufactured, rather than properly born, “carved out of ice, like a swan in a medieval banquet”, with a heart that never really beats.

Her beloved mother’s death, evoked by Thomson in a bravura passage, triggers a crisis. Grief makes her feel as though “a black wind was blowing through me, wreaking havoc”. Kit goes AWOL from her life. She flees from Rome to Berlin, then Moscow; then, in a skin-prickling echo of Shelley’s narrative, to Archangel and beyond. She ends her flight in a desolate Russian coal-mining settlement, based on Barentsburg, in the bleakly beautiful archipelago of Svalbard.

She becomes an escapee from the half-life destiny determined by her origins and by the neglect of her absent father. Kit erases all trace of her identity via trickery, disguise and seduction. The Far North swallows her. There, unknown and unreachable, “I’m a blank slate. A gamble”. Can she inter herself in the same ice whence she came?

As always, Thomson’s immersive prose tugs like a thriller and haunts like a dream. Here, the Gothic shivers of his theme and mood enrich the tone of swift-running existential noir he mastered in earlier novels such as The Insult and The Book of Revelation. The scenes in which Kit seems to discover her own journey depicted in the snow-globes of a backstreet shop in Archangel would make MR James himself purr with delight.

Meanwhile, Thomson’s flair for the breath-stopping image flourishes as mightily as ever, above all in the endless Arctic night where Kit can see “whole galaxies scattered across the sky, like cocaine on a smoked-glass table”.

During her flight, Kit starts to fantasise about her father’s pursuit of his lost daughter across Europe. Scene by scene, speculation by speculation, these sections humanise him – and allow her to grow.

Do we glimpse a flicker of light in this near-polar dark? In any Thomson novel, dawn will never break without shock, peril and suspense. Still, this extra-terrestrial child of ice begins to imagine a thaw.

Katherine Carlyle, by Rupert Thomson (Corsair, £14.99). Order at the discounted price of £12.74 inc. p&p from the Independent Bookshop