The Rift by Nina Allan

If your entire teenage years were lived in the shadow of your sister's disappearance, who would you be? What would you do? And what would you do if she came back twenty years later, telling tales about having been on another planet all that time?

This is more or less the premise of The Rift, and Nina Allan does a competent job with these ideas, although, for some reason, the book never really soared for me. It's so close, but it doesn't quite get there. I think that's because there are aspects of the story that aren't as fully explored as I'd need them to be to feel emotionally connected. There's a distance here, from the past, and from the characters, and I felt similarly held at arm's length.

So, it's good, and I think worth checking out if the premise intrigues you, but unfortunately, the comparison that kept popping unbidden into my head, was with Slaughterhouse Five and Tralfamadore, and that's not a comparison that is going to do The Rift any favours. But that a person who went to another planet (or possibly is fantasizing their way through trauma), comes back and no one believes them feels quite similar.

I guess the question is what is done with it. This is definitely a book that does not want to give you a complete answer, and I applaud the ambiguity at the end. It's something in the lead-up that didn't quite make that final ambiguity pack as large a punch as it might have otherwise. I think it may be that, in a story that should have a lot of emotional punch, it's so cerebral that this all feels like an interesting mental exercise.

But let's talk about the book a little bit more. Selena is in her thirties, working at a jewelry store, resistant to making any firm plans for her life, drifting away from a boyfriend, and avoiding doing any further training in gemology, which she would enjoy and be good at. This might be because her sister Julie disappeared when she was sixteen, and was never found again. Her father drove himself to death trying to find her. Her mother is a bit of a cipher, although we do actually spend some time with her in a couple of pivotal scenes. But again, it's at a bit of a distance. Her decisions, which should feel more intense, occupy a place that is interesting, but not emotional.

Then Julie gets in touch with Selena, and they meet, a few times, and gradually Julie tells her story to Selena, which is that she was picked up by the serial killer everyone feared killed her, but managed to escape, and slipped through a rift to another planet, Tristane. There she lived for a while, with Cally and Noel, two characters we don't get to know very well. This entire life is also at a remove - we do not get any intense scenes of her time there, just some rather mundane ones where Cally tells Julie Julie has always lived there, while Julie remembers her time on earth. There isn't any real drama between those three characters (if there was, that section might have been more vivid and allowed readers an in, but no).

The only real drama on Tristane, which otherwise seems like a perfectly pleasant planet that we don't find out that much about other than the geography, is that there was a sister planet that cut off communication some time ago. A novel was floating around claiming to be a first person account of a man who was on the sister planet with an expeditionary force that came into contact with parasites that live inside a human for quite a long time, animating their bodies, and then subsuming them. There is no recovery.

This is probably the best part of the book! It's interesting and emotional, and unfortunately, it only occupies a relatively small number of pages. So there's the fear on Tristane, or at least Julie fears, that the worms that animate your body will eventually take over Tristane again. But, uh...it doesn't happen, that we see.

(Then there's a side story about a teacher Julie flirted with who is hauled in for questioning after Julie disappears, and it is not that it isn't interesting, it's just that it's shoehorned in, and nothing much is done with it.)

So, back on Earth, there are questions about Julie's identity, about whether or not she's someone insane who has latched on to Julie's story, and about whether or not Tristane is real, or a post-traumatic reaction. And then, whether or not there are brain-eating worms on Tristane and might make their way to Earth at some point.

This is a very far away place to put the danger. It's an interesting danger, it's just not anywhere near what should be the emotional core. It's just a lot of weirdly placed attention. I like the genre switching, the integration of newspaper stories and movies with the text, but the story itself needs some serious tightening up.