Book Review: The Book of Rapture

Three children wake up in a basement room. They have been drugged and taken from their beds in the middle of the night. Now they are alone. Where are their parents? Who can they trust? The family has been betrayed to the government and Salt Cottage, their home on a cliff top above the ocean, is no longer safe. Their mother’s scientific work has put them all in danger. To protect them, she must let them go. She must put her faith in an old family friend – and her children’s own resilience and courage.

The Book of Rapture is Nikki Gemmell’s first, highly publicized, novel since 2003’s big selling, ‘controversial’ The Bride Stripped Bare and despite stylistic similarities, is a marked thematic departure. Rapture is saddled with a clear ideological agenda, dragging age old enemies, science and religion into the arena. This exploration is ably assisted by chapter-ending moral, political and philosophical ‘lessons’ from a collection of familiar, largely sacred texts.

As the book unfolds, in short, bite sized chapters, rarely more than two pages long, we discover the three children in the room have been left there by their scientist mother, who had been working on a top secret scientific project – a weapon of mass destruction designed to target specific races. Despite leaving the project before its completion, for the safety of her children, she has been kidnapped and forced to finish it as civil war tears the country apart. Trusting the resilience of her children, she has left them in Salt Cottage, which is where we find them when the book opens.

“Rapture” takes as its cue Salman Rushdie’s rallying cry for novelists… “A writer’s work is to name the unnameable, to point to frauds, to take sides, start arguments, shape the world and stop it from going to sleep.”

Nikki Gemmell

I can’t quite make up my mind about Nikki Gemmel. She has an undeniable way with words; they’re her play thing, and she is as capable of twisting them into uncomfortable sentences as she is beautiful or confronting moments. Depending on how one is feeling, this can make for compulsive reading or a struggle to really get into the rhythm of the book. Again, as with The Bride Stripped Bare, she writes in the second person which pulls you headfirst in the book whether you like it or not, creating a sense of intimacy which is at times claustrophobic and confusing, and more often than not, jarring.

At times Gemmell is a self conscious writer, one who puts the themes of her work in bright lights and stands there pointing at them just in case you missed them. Take, for instance, the introduction of Rapture which comes from fictional Professor A.R. Bowler from the University of London.

It explores with an almost mythical quality, the conflict between science and religion, notions of theological sacrifice and a woman’s impotent – and potent – rage. It asks that vexed question: if science does succeed in destroying religion, what moral code do we then live by?

P viii The Book of Rapture

As readers, we read books to discover things for ourselves. We get lost in characters and their stories simply to come out the other side with an idea, a stance, an opinion or at the very least, a desire to know more. It’s our job to reach these conclusive states, whatever they are. Pointing out what the book is about in an introduction is a prescriptive measure, one that confines the reader and sends them into the story with preconceptions and expectations of what the book is about and what it should be about to the reader.

Together with the second person narration, there is little room for independent thought and feeling as a reader, which is what makes The Book of Rapture an, at times, difficult read. If you can turn a blind eye to what you are being told to see in the novel, and look for your own rhyme and reason, it will be a much more satisfying experience. That you actively have to do that is where the novel fails.

Published by Fourth Estate, an imprint of Harper Collins Publishers

$29.99