Review by New York Times Review
TOWARD THE END of "Frankenstein," Mary Shelley's mad scientist travels across Europe in pursuit of his monstrous creation. "Guided by a slight clue," he tells us, "I followed the windings of the Rhone, but vainly." His desire for revenge - and for closure - takes him across the Mediterranean and through Russia and Asia, to what may have felt like the very ends of the earth. The creature has purposely led him farther and farther astray: "Sometimes, indeed, he left marks in writing on the barks of the trees, or cut in stone, that guided me, and instigated my fury." Of course, Dr. Victor Frankenstein ends up lost in the snow and ice of the distant north. The eponymous narrator of Rupert Thomson's elegant new novel, 19-year-old Katherine (Kit) Carlyle, has lost her mother to cancer and her father, for long periods of time, to his career as a war correspondent. Like Frankenstein, she devotes herself to following a series of strange clues, either real or imagined: "It was spring when I first started noticing the messages. Back then, they were cryptic. While crossing Piazza Farnese, I found a 50-euro note that had been folded into a triangle. A few days later, at the foot of the Spanish Steps, I found a small gray plastic elephant with a piece of frayed string round its neck. I found any number of coins, keys and playing cards. None of these objects had anything specific to communicate." A random conversation, overheard at an outdoor movie screening, sets Kit off on her journey. "I always knew that sooner or later one of the messages would feel right," she explains. Like Frankenstein's, her travels will take her across Europe to the frozen wilds of Russia. What she's seeking proves as elusive as the monster. With her father far away on assignment yet again, Kit forgoes enrolling at Oxford and throws her cellphone into the Tiber. The messages she finds - and her whims - send her from Rome to Berlin; Warsaw; Moscow; the town of Arkhangelsk, near Russia's White Sea; and eventually a mining town called Ugolgrad, even farther to the north. There, to the surprise of the locals, she finds work and attempts to settle down. The apparent correlation with "Frankenstein" runs even deeper. "I was made in a small square dish," Kit tells us. She had been an I.V.F. baby, stored as a frozen embryo for eight years. If Victor Frankenstein's sin was defying the gods by creating new life, what does Thomson's tale suggest about Kit? Is she the work of a kind of postmodern Prometheus? We know she's resentful of her absentee father and still angry that she spent such a long time stored in a "steel barrel, vacuum-lined like a thermos flask," prior to her birth. "It's because you thought I would be a monster," she tells her father in a fit of rage. The novel raises any number of ethical questions about parent- and personhood. Much to Thomson's credit, he offers no easy answers. Readers will decide for themselves if Kit is meant to be a standin for Dr. Frankenstein, for his creature or for something else entirely. At times, she comes across as both the pursuer and the pursued. Her motivations don't entirely make sense, but perhaps that's true of most teenagers. Thomson is the author of nine previous novels, two of which have been finalists for some impressive prizes. Those years of experience find expression in poised and crystalline prose that piles lovely sentence atop lovely sentence. The spare language doesn't call undue attention to itself until the rushed ending, the extreme brutality of which suggests that Kit would have been better off staying at home. That's unfortunate. Nevertheless, "Katherine Carlyle" is a substantial novel, a story told with authority about a bold woman who in abrogating some of her many privileges hopes to find new meaning for her young life. ANDREW ERVIN is the author of a collection of novellas, "Extraordinary Renditions," and a novel, "Burning Down George Orwell's House."
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [December 6, 2015]
Review by Booklist Review
Katherine, better known as Kit, is expected to begin her college studies at Oxford, but with her father busy reporting in distant countries, who really cares what she does with her life? Instead, she leaves her home in Rome to pursue a man in Germany whose name and address she overheard in a cinema. From there, she follows a string of coincidences to the far reaches of the earth, seeking a new life that will remove her from the memories of her mother's death and punish her father for his seeming indifference. With every step she takes farther from home, though, she wonders what her father will do when he finds her missing and if he'll try to find her. Ostensibly a journey in search of solitude, Kit's increasingly reckless path lays bare the truth about her flight, that the act of running away may actually be a plea for being found. Thomson's simply stated prose is made richer by the flaws of Kit's character, resulting in an honest and worthy story of self-discovery.--Ophoff, Cortney Copyright 2015 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
In Thomson's (Secrecy) wonderfully written novel, London native Katherine "Kit" Carlyle is a headstrong, fanciful, and flighty 19-year-old living in Rome. Her father, David, is a roving CNN journalist who was largely an absent parent, and her mother, Stephanie, died of cancer six years previously. Having landed a scholarship to study at Oxford University, Kit obsesses over the fact that she is an IVF baby: she was stored for eight years as an embryo before she was implanted in Stephanie. Kit feels as if David blames her for causing Stephanie's cancer by the IVF procedure, so Kit decides to run away and come to terms with her own identity. Kit travels to Berlin to stay with the orthodontist Klaus Frings, demonstrating her uncanny knack for meeting a series of helpful, generous strangers. All the while, she enjoys fantasizing about the scenes of her frantic, desperate father searching for her, and she even arranges rendezvous with him, which she doesn't attend. She calls herself Misty and leaves Berlin to stay in Moscow, adding another layer of deception to her vanishing act. Thomson's seamless prose style and striking minor characters round out this satisfying, offbeat narrative. (Oct.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
Conceived in a fertility lab where she languished for eight years before being implanted in her mother's womb, Katherine Carlyle has never gotten over the long period of absence. That sense of loss deepens after her mother dies from ovarian cancer, which may have been caused by her IVF treatments. Katherine takes her resentment out on her father, a globe-trotting journalist, when she decides to cut herself off from him and from everyone else in her life. Instead of leaving for Oxford University as planned, she erases all traces of herself and reroutes to Berlin in search of a man she has only heard discussed by strangers in a movie theater. After briefly connecting with him, she moves on to other random men until she obtains a Russian visa and heads for Ugolgrad, a remote outpost in the frozen north. VERDICT Katherine -Carlyle is an oddly compelling heroine whose eccentric disappearing act becomes a journey of self-discovery. This is a novel with panache.-Barbara Love, -formerly with Kingston Frontenac P.L., Ont. © Copyright 2015. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
A young woman sets out to find the isolation she craves in Thomson's (Secrecy, 2014, etc.) picaresque novel. The 19-year-old title character retains vague memories of being an IVF embryo. Her mother's death and the perpetual absence of her father, a CNN reporter, contribute to a life in which being solitary is the natural state. To bring her physical circumstance into concert with her psychic state, Katherine, a few weeks before she's due to enter Oxford, cleans out her bank accounts and, without telling anyone, takes off for stark and increasingly bleak surroundings culminating in a remote island in northern Russia. Unlike the hero of her favorite film, Antonioni's The Passenger, Katherine wants less to start over than to exist in a state of anonymity. For Thomson, Katherine's quest is an understandable reaction to a digital world that's both intrusive and disconnected. But though her voice achieves a consistent tone of blank angst, Katherine feels more a construct than a character. Worse, the intrusive passages in which she imagines her father's attempts to find her threaten to make her flight seem an adolescent stunt. The finish, in which Thomson brings together all the book's strands, is a technical feat and, because of the cruelty to which he subjects Katherine and the triteness of the denouement, both homiletic and sadistic. A book that promises insight into the emotional detachment of our current technological overload should deliver more than the resolution of daddy issues. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
