The Rapture

[sawyl]

Late on in Liz Jensen's The Rapture one of the characters quotes some words from St Paul that throw the rest of the book into relief: Behold, I show you a mystery; we shall not all sleep, but we shall all be changed. In a moment, in the twinkling of an eye (1 Cor 15:51–52). For Paul's words unite the two principal themes of the book, sudden climate change and rapture-ready Christianity, just as they describe the trajectories of the main characters.

For narrator Gabrielle Fox, profound change has come in the form of a car accident that has broken her spine and left her with no feeling bellow her belly button. Shaken from her previous life, she has left friends and old haunts behind to move to a place where no-one knows her in order to take a post as clinical psychology at Oxsmith Hospital, a secure facility for adolescent criminals. Physically vulnerable, relative to her patients, and mentally fragile, worried that fate has forced her to abandon large parts of her former life, Gabrielle is not really the ideal therapist for the violent and unpredictable. But, profoundly determined to try and resume some form of normal life, she has decided to return to the only thing that she feels she was ever any good at.

It's here that the book feels least like a thriller, with Jensen taking time to explore Gabrielle's gradual resumption of life following her accident. The details are good: the irritations of endless wheelchair unfriendly buildings; the joys of swimming; the patronising assumptions of the people she meets at a charity event; and the craziness of her stalker, who turns out to be the woman whose job she has taken over at Oxsmith. Good too is her growing relationship with Frazer. Emotionally scarred by the failure of his marriage, he is kind and considerate and thoughtful; just the person Gabrielle needs to help build up confidence and to convince herself that love and sex and physicality are still open to her after her accident.

Bethany Krall, too, has undergone profound changes in her short life. Committed to Oxsmith after murdering mother with a screwdriver, she has abandoned her parents' evangelical Christianity in favour of self-harm and a obsessive belief that she is already dead. In an attempt to treat these symptoms, Bethany's doctors have prescribed a course of ECT which, while it seems to have addressed some of the symptoms of Cotard's syndrome, seems to triggered a series of visions of the future. As Bethany's therapist, Gabrielle is naturally sceptical of the visions. But when, with the assistance of friendly physicist Frazer Melville, she is able to correlate the predictions with a series of natural catastrophes and, in another moment of profound change, her doubts start to evaporate.

The spark that sets off the thriller proper, Bethany combines absolutely vile behaviour with a deep sense of neediness. Her treatment of Gabrielle is, until close to the end, consistently appalling with Bethany making use of her prescience to apply particular pressure to the most sensitive spots of Gabrielle's fragile self-confidence. But Bethany ultimately needs her therapist, not just because of her confinement in the hospital, but because she too wants to unravel the mysteries of her visions. But she also becomes, just about, sympathetic. After Gabrielle's disastrous encounter with Pastor Leonard Krall — who, hardly true to the spirit of Christ's teachings, accuses her of faking and tips her out of her wheelchair — it becomes possible to guess at the extremes that might have driven his daughter to kill.

Events start to come to a head when Bethany starts talking about events that seem worryingly close to the Last Judgement. Feeling a moral obligation to bring the news to the public, Frazer and Gabrielle — not for nothing, that name — reach out to Harish Modak, the pessimistic founder of the radial Planetarian eco-group, for help. After deliberately electrocuting, Bethany is abducted from a local hospital and a helter-skelter chase ensues, full of misunderstandings and publicity stunts and stadiums full of rapture-ready Christians, while all the time the end of the world or, quite possibly, the rapture, draws ever nearer.

Again, the words of St Paul hold the key. To Bethany's father, Leonard, the words of Paul are heard through dispensational ears — to quote from a Slacktivist post on the same words in Left Behind:

But for Vernon Billings -- and for LaHaye and Jenkins -- those subheadings are all wrong. They don't think this chapter has anything to do with resurrection. For them, it's all about the Rapture.

Pastor Billings continued, "Let me paraphrase some of that so you'll understand it clearly. When Paul says we shall not all sleep, he means that we shall not all die."

Billings doesn't care about the resurrection of the dead. He's hoping for something he thinks would be even better -- not dying at all. Thus where the majority of Christians for 2,000 years read Paul as saying "We shall not all SLEEP, but we will all be CHANGED," Billings and L&J read Paul as saying "We shall not ALL sleep, but WE will all be changed."

While to Modak and the Planetarians, the change is the great shift in climate that brings about the end of civilised society and the beginning of a Wyndham-eseque period of survivalism. So much for eschatology.

But big questions remain. Which group, in the final instance, are the saved? And where did the visions come from? Was their source good or evil? And is there any truth to the belief, started by Gabrielle's unfortunate predecessor, that Bethany wasn't so much as source of visions as a shaper of the horrible future she claims to have foreseen?

I very much recommend The Rapture which, if not a deep meditation on science and scientists and climate in the vein of Kim Stanley Robinson, is a gripping and extremely effective thriller. The setting, a near-future England overheated by a combination of high temperatures and the evangelism of the US-like Christianity of the Faith Wave, is convincing, populated by a cast of excellent characters — Gabrielle, with her combination of fragility and toughness is particularly good — and with some wonderfully iconic moments that really stick in the memory.