The Rapture [Hardcover]

 

 

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Reason for Reading: Apocalyptic fiction is one of my favourite sub-genres. I received a review copy from Random House Canada.

Summary: It is the not too distant future and the world has entered a new phase, one where global warming has happened and temperatures, weather and climates are no longer what they used to be. Gabrielle Fox is a wheelchair bound art therapist who has started a new job at a Psychiatric Hospital, home to Britain's most dangerous children and she has been assigned the most dangerous of all, Bethany Krall, who brutally stabbed her mother to death with a screwdriver when she was 12. Bethany also predicts the future, not just any future but future natural disasters (storms, earthquakes, etc.) and as Gabrielle realizes each one comes true she begins to believe her patient and feels guilt for not warning the thousands of people who die. A strange bond develops between therapist and patient with the position of authority often switching.

Comments: I'll start by saying I neither believe in the evangelical concept of the Rapture nor that global warming has anything to do with human produced carbon dioxide. These are the two main controversies presented in this book. I will also say that ultimately, I did enjoy the plot; the story of the Gabrielle and Bethany, the predictions and the ultimate race for survival as the apocalypse approaches.

Within this world there are two extremist groups; one The Planetarians who know humans are but a blip in the age the Earth and our time is over as dominant species and nature is taking its natural course as it has over millions of years in the past and a new organism will take our place as dominant species. On the opposite end there is The Fifth Wave, a mass convergence and conversion to Christianity who believe The Rapture is at hand. They strive to bring their friends and loved ones to the Lord so they to may rise above the clouds in the rapture. These people happily await the coming of the rapture. Neither of these extremist groups take a major part in the story until well into the book but near the beginning, being a Catholic, I wondered "well, what about Catholics? The author must know we don't believe in the rapture?" My answer came by page 75 when the main character states during a discussion of disparaging religion is general:

" I was taught by nuns," I tell him. " They couldn't see how tribalistic they were. Or how pagan. As for the traditions, it seems to me that the Catholic Church enjoys just making things up as it goes along. You could almost admire its creativity."

Right, anti-Catholic view expressed, noted and understood. Catholics are not ever referred to again in the book. I was not impressed with the overall anti-religion attitude carried on throughout the whole book. Though I don't share the same convictions as the Christians portrayed here it was insulting the way they were shown as smiling, happy, ignorant people joyfully walking to their probable deaths. No respect was shown when conversation turned towards this group. The reveal that comes out about the leader is cliched and unoriginal. While on the otherhand the leader of the Planetarians is treated with respect, while professional people scoff at his ideology, he is, afterall, a man of science.

I was also underwhelmed by a love affair that happened and felt completely out of place within the story and otherwise out of character for the strong roll Gabrielle was playing elsewhere. There were pages and pages of this romantic misunderstanding drivel that I just wanted to shout "Get over it already!".

Otherwise, the book is well-written, it reads fast. The momentum is there slowly picking up and ending with a crash. Bethany was an outstanding character, the one who really shines through and kept me reading. Even with the religious problems I had, I realized the slant very early on, and accepted it as part of the story. It is fiction after all. I liked the book but didn't love it. I think other reviewers will say they have felt emotional over the book; it didn't affect me emotionally at all. I couldn't see myself as plausibly being in this world Jensen created. However, I do think this book will appeal to many people. The topic of climate change is one many readers will want to explore in this visionary apocalypse of our planet's downfall from human doings.

Three damaged souls lie at the heart of Jensen's cinematic and apocalyptic novel that begins when art therapist Gabrielle Fox starts work at the Oxsmith Adolescent psychiatric Hospital in Hadport, Southern England. It is here where the evil and self-possessed Bethany Krall lies incarcerated. Intractable and violent the fourteen-year-old Bethany has a formidable reputation. The reports of her mother's murder still manage to stir up a familiar heart sinking queasiness, stabbing her mother Karen to death with a screwdriver in a frenzied and unexplained attack while Bethany's father Leonard, an evangelical preacher was away at a prophecy conference. When Gabrielle first meets Bethany she's two weeks into what has been billed as a six-month posting, and is assigned to Bethany because no one else wants to deal with her. She's also filling in for Joy McConey, a psychotherapist who has left the institution in a unspoken disgrace. From the outset however, Bethany proves to be intractable and violent. The reports of Karen, her mother's murder still manage to stir up a familiar heart sinking queasiness, stabbing Karen to death with a screwdriver in a frenzied and unexplained attack while Bethany's father Leonard, an evangelical preacher was away at a prophecy conference.

While Bethany draws a huge strength from somewhere, in her sessions with Gabriel, she's nasty and belligerent and she behaves like she's up for a fight and looks like trouble, it is the ECT - a type of electronic shock therapy interventions, where "she feels more alive then ever before," yet she refuses to discuss her parents and the catastrophic event that bought her here. But the ECT treatments stimulate a strange preoccupation with climate change, chemical pollution, and apocalyptic scenarios. Manipulative, and prone to dramatic mood swings, she begins to sprout well-informed psychotic fantasies, biblical outpourings, and then sudden extreme violence. The poor Gabrielle is trust into a situation in which she least able to control. Still reeling from a tragic car accident sixteen months ago which has left her paralyzed from the waist down, the therapist becomes ever more obsessed with Bethany and her apocalyptic visions.

But Bethany is constantly hurtful and makes fun of Bethany's misfortune. She's seen things she can't possibly know and said things she shouldn't have and more than anything Gabrielle wants to damage her. She also "register's stuff" - seas burning. Sheets of fire. All of humanity dying a horrible death. Whole coasts washed away. Are these drug induced visions? Daydreams? Or is it metaphorical? Gabrielle senses an electric energy about Bethany, an immense reservoir of violence and anger. A sixteen year old murderess who is obsessed with the apocalypse even as she tells of the Rapture, "a form of salvation for the righteous." When Frazer Melville, a Scottish physicist arrives on the scene, he's also drawn to Bethany with intractability and her militant cynicism and this strange power to predict natural catastrophes. Frazer driven by curiosity about Bethany's jigsaw puzzle that whirls around global warming, also finds himself attracted to Gabrielle. There affair is absurdly romantic, and Gabrielle's broken body is tumbled into a turmoil of wanting. Not knowing how to get, how to have, Frazer helps her reawaken herself as a woman who can make love, replenishing her battered soul.

When a warning comes from Joy Mcconey: "Bethany Krall's more dangerous than you think. She feels things. Blood and minerals. The way things flow," the past and the future once held in embryo are in danger of being wiped out, a hurricane in Rio, an earthquake in Istanbul. And then there's the drawings from her notebook - a mining operation, four oil rigs with yellow cranes. The text scrawled in black, sets of dates, places and events. Some are written in black and others in green red blue. Premonitions of disaster. Bethany's visions are a catalyst for much of the disasters that for page upon page begin to sweep through this story.

Indeed Jensen's cinematic apocalyptic scenario that makes up the last part of the book is impressive, if not a little Hollywood-like even as she paints a vast landscape of disaster and a runaway depiction of global warming in a scale that's beyond anyone's worst nightmare. Certainly the efforts of Gabriel, Frazer and their collection of scientists are pitiful against such magnitude. An exploration of the sheer force of belief and the incapability of true faith, The Rapture is mostly a cautionary tale of a planet in peril where fundamentalist religion and the beginnings of "The Rapture" are framed against the very real dangers of climate change. There's no doubt that Gabrielle and Bethany's personal stories run in stark counterpoint to the ungoverned world disasters even as Bethany seems to be psychically linked to them: "She has her own volcanic eruptions, her own changing atmosphere, her own form of melt down." The relationship between the two women gives this novel its offbeat emotional core as they both seem to find an inner strength in the face of these catastrophic events. In what is basically a disaster novel, written with an eye for Cecil B Demille grandeur, Jensen's action never stops, from Bethany's kidnapping to the climax in London's Olympic Stadium, there comes a rapidly unfolding rain of assaults on man, and the intimate worlds of Bethany, Fraser and Gabriel are starkly juxtaposed as they race against time to stop the full force of nature. Mike Leonard August 09.

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