When the whole world slows down for a girl with an uncertain future

 
P52
21 June 2012

The Age of Miracles
by Karen Thompson Walker
(Simon & Schuster, £14.99)

In these days of publishing austerity, Karen Thompson Walker’s debut novel has the air of some fabulous creature from a vanished age. At a time when most first novels command advances that are scarcely enough to cover the cost of a ream of A4 and a toner cartridge, Thompson Walker’s gentle dystopian coming-of-age fiction earned her an advance of $1 million in the US, and £500,000 in the UK.

Thompson Walker, a former editor at Simon & Schuster US, was inspired to write her novel by the news that the Indonesian earthquake of 2004 was so powerful it affected the Earth’s rotation, imperceptibly shortening the length of a day.

In The Age of Miracles the days get dramatically longer, rather than shorter. Thompson Walker’s heroine, Julia, is a thoughtful soon-to-be 12-year-old when the events known as the Slowing begin. But her story is told in retrospect, from the distance of more than a decade, allowing for a mature (and occasionally sententious) narratorial voice, prone to passages of wistful grown-up hindsight.

“Later,” thinks Julia, reflecting on the beginnings of the Slowing, “I would come to think of those first days as the time when we learned as a species that we had worried over the wrong things… But I guess it never is what you worry over that comes to pass in the end. The real catastrophes are always different — unimagined, unprepared for, unknown.”

News of the Slowing breaks on an ordinary Saturday morning in Julia’s suburban Californian community. Her best friend Hanna has been for a sleepover and they are about to set off to soccer practice when Julia’s mother appears in a panic. “Turn on the TV right now,” she says. “Something God-awful is happening.”

If Thompson were writing genre fiction, her novel would now rush headlong into all the extremities generally associated with dystopian fiction. It is one of the most attractive features of The Age of Miracles that the comforting ordinariness of Julia’s world remains so little disturbed.

“There was no footage to show on television, no burning buildings …” Julia explains. “I think this explains why what I felt first was not fear but a thrill. It was a little exciting — a sudden sparkle amid the ordinary...”

While her mother rails at the television and stockpiles food, Julia continues with her routine of soccer practice and piano lessons. The thrill of being noticed by Seth, a boy at school, preoccupies her more than the interminable daylight.

Julia’s sweet egotism is beautifully drawn by Thompson Walker, as is the dawning maturity that lends her a sudden chilly perception of her parents’ troubled relationship, even as she frets about buying her first bra.

The dystopian element of the novel is less successful. It’s not just that the science becomes increasingly unconvincing. The problem is that while a coming-of-age novel might be forgiven for drifting to a stop without much in the way of resolution, a reader expects something more conclusive when science fiction is involved.

Thompson Walker starts various promising narrative threads — the relationship between Julia and her grandfather, her parents’ failing marriage, her own blooming first love with Seth — each of which unfolds quite captivatingly, thanks to a prose style of resonant simplicity.

But unfold is all they do. There is a disconcerting absence, not merely of denouement but, in the book’s final third, of narrative energy. It is as though Thompson Walker, having imagined her heroine into being, is uncertain whether to let her live or die, and settles, rather unsatisfactorily, on leaving her in limbo.

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