BOOK REPORT: DISAPPEARING EARTH BY JULIA PHILLIPS

LATE LAST NIGHT I WAS READING A COLLECTION OF SHORT detective fiction about a Edinburgh police inspector. With the exception of one or two of the tales, especially one in which the detective reveals he recently killed a man in the line of duty and how the act filled him with remorse, I found most of the stories too pat. I did enjoy how the author was able to construct ‘mini’ crime tales, with all the sleuthing and discovery done in such a neat packet. But I just didn’t want to read anymore; I felt I would be disappointed by the time I reached the end. So I put it on my “Return to Library” pile, somewhat reluctantly I’ll admit, for I would miss the author’s cleverness, wit, and crime solving plots.

So, in the wee hours I forged on. I picked up Julia Phillips Disappearing Earth, and was hooked from the first chapter!
The plot involves the abduction of two young sisters as they played in a secluded cove near the city center of Petropavlosk-Kamchatsky on the south-east coast of Russia’s Kamchatka Peninsula. The setting is exotic and interesting, but it is Phillips’s depiction of her characters, their thoughts and emotions that makes her novel a compelling read. She writes with a crisp, spare style that allows the reader to clearly understand her characters.

The story is told in a third person narration, using multiple points of view, beginning in Chapter One with Alyona, the elder of the two kidnapped sisters. Through her, we see the life of an eleven year old—her family, community life, her relationship with her sister (who she had to look after because she was born second and therefore had the “privilege of staying a baby all her life.”) Phillips captures this scene of childhood innocence perfectly. And with an economy of writing, she then creates the nightmare wave of a predator that washes over the two girls, like the tsunami Aloyna tells her eight-year old sister about in a story. The title suggests the sweeping away of the past, of the once-safe landscape in which the girls played, and thematically, how the Kamchatka Peninsula has been changed by the tidal forces following the collapse of the Soviet Union.

Chapters are titled by the month, indicating a month has passed, and the whole story takes place over the course of a year. In the early chapters, we are introduced to the main characters, again with Phillips’s economic style, who give their perspectives on the—as yet unsolved—crime. The crime is set within the context of everyday life—a newscast watched, in gossip, in the report of a single witness. And it is seen in the lives of the women, in their thoughts and perceptions and deeply felt emotions. It is in Phillips's unpacking of each character's mind that makes the story so compelling. Like the apple that is peeled and proffered to one of the women by her  lover, so too, are the women's thoughts and feelings exposed. As a reader, we want to understand more about them.

In the second chapter we meet Olya, a schoolgirl, who has no connection to the missing girls but whose friend’s mother has regular talks with the police detective as he searches for clues at the school the sisters attended. In the next chapter we meet Katya, a customs officer, who is newly in love and on a camping trip. Her boyfriend works with someone who witnessed the abduction. Thus, connections are made between individuals and the crime that has disturbed their community. And so it goes.

Julia Phillips

Each chapter has a female through whose perspective Phillips weaves her tale. Men are husbands, lovers, friends, colleagues  and adversaries. Most seem at the periphery of the women’s lives. Where they intersect, there are depictions of pain and pleasure, care and disappointment, longing and regret. (Perhaps Phillips suggests here the insular nature of what it is to be human, how like a peninsula it is, having only tenuous connections, at times, between the self and others.) 
It is the women, for the most part, who suffer and observe, preserve and maintain in this complex society, with its mix of urban and rural, ethnic and Russian peoples. The themes of overturning past beliefs, self-realization and stoicism are developed. For example, Valentina Nikolaevna confronts the truth she has cancer and has to be operated on immediately. The control she established in her life, where she felt she did not need anyone’s help or compassion, is challenged as she walks, naked and vulnerable, into the surgery. There are a number of such scenes of self-discovery and acceptance and bravery, with each chapter reading almost like a set piece. The novel is more like a 'tapestry' of lives than a plot-driven ‘who-done-it’.

Phillips describes Kamchatka with her simple, direct prose and attention to detail, giving the reader a sense of the importance the land has for the people living there; how traditional lifestyles and values conflict with modern ones, and how life has changed after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Her descriptions of the ethnic tensions between Russians and native peoples in the region are reminiscent of the conflicts we witness in Canada between people of European descent and First Nations people.

She provides a rich tapestry of the lives and landscape of Kamchatka that is interwoven with this terrible crime. Her concluding chapter is a panoply of emotion that leaves the reader exhausted, and incredibly satisfied.

Cheers

Nabbs is pooped!