This Is Our Undoing by Lorraine Wilson
I would like to thank Francesca from Luna Press Publishing for an advance copy of this novel in exchange for a fair and honest review
Publisher – Luna Press Publishing
Published – Out Now
Price – £12.99 paperback £4.29 Kindle eBook
Could you condemn one child to save another?
In a near-future Europe fracturing under climate change and far-right politics, biologist Lina Stephenson works in the remote Rila Mountains, safely away from London State. When an old enemy dies, Lina's dangerous past resurfaces, putting her family's lives at risk.
Trapped with her vulnerable sister alongside the dead man's family, Lina is facing pressure from all sides: her enemy's eldest son is determined to destroy her in his search for vengeance, whilst his youngest carries a sinister secret...
...But the forest is hiding its own threats and as a catastrophic storm closes in, Lina realises that if she is to save her family, she must become a monster.
When you’re away from the hustle and bustle of a city you can feel both liberated from the stresses and scrutiny of everyone in the street but you are also aware you are strangely vulnerable. Open skies, forests where anything can lurk and a sense that now you are the intruder, the wilderness can make you just wonder who or what is watching. Help is a long way away if you’re in danger. All these sensations and more gripped me when reading the truly remarkable This Is Our Undoing by Lorraine Wilson a story that absolutely grabbed me from the first page throwing in a powerful plot crossing the borders of speculative fiction with ease and is already one of my reads of the year.
It is the near future and in Bulgaria a substantial portion of the countryside owned by a multi-government taskforce trying to restore wildlife with eyes of local inhabitants viewing the project’s use of tagging and proposals to even tag the locals with huge distrust. Working for the powerful ESF is biologist Lina Stephenson a woman who is keen to keep away from a UK that has turned into a right-wing dictatorship for many decades. But the assassination of one of the UK’s most prominent and ruthless politicians sets in motion a wave of events that threatens Lina’s seclusion. An old lover who shared Lina’s radical past finds himself arrested by the dangerous state police and Lina knows that due to her ties she must urgently rescue her father and sibling. Her old revolutionary network begins the dangerous task of extraction. But to make matters more dangerous the wife and children of the murdered politician get moved to Lina’s secluded base to ‘recover.’ The widow Seline is very disturbed in grief and fear of what happens next while her son Xander is restless, angry and for his own schemes hacking into ESF’s security to find out more about Lina and her team. Also, with them is the eerie stepchild Kai who seems entranced by the forests and what lurks inside. Mysterious dolls wrapped in blood begin to appear and Lina’s rescue mission goes wrong fast. Everyone has secrets and revenge sought on multiple fronts.
What immediately grabs you in this novel is the huge amount of tension it quickly generates. That feeling from a story that anything can go wrong and fast and the stakes are personal and yet feel very high. From the initial scene of Lina meeting hostile locals who view her team with suspicion you get the feeling this is a tale where no one can get too comfortable. The clash of old and new world already brewing is soon mixed up with the bloody events in the UK to further add danger to this landscape. Lina’s own constructed identify and secrets are revealed for the first time in years and she has to start learning who she can trust with her secrets. We move from a climate change attacked countryside to a world of code words and hidden messages that you can never quite be sure who is listening. Lina becomes again a lowly player in games of international politics and secret border crossings knowing she herself can never leave the research station and do anything herself without making her vulnerable. Wilson gives us snapshots of Lina’s family life and makes us worry about these delicate bewildered people sucked into a game where someone is very keen to ask Lina exactly how much she knows about what is going on in the UK. This creates waves of distrust especially when Seline and Xander arrive on top to further unsettle things and Lina has to pretend to know very little of life in the UK.
To keep that air of tension making this such a very tight read there are very few scenes of info-dumping to disrupt the flow of storytelling. This is very much a world where the reader has to put clues together. Even Lina’s employers and the project they work are references obliquely to piece together the clues of a Europe trying to rebuild itself. We know it can now see super-cell storms and strange toxins in animal populations hinting at environmental collapse, but this all adds texture rather than taking over or slowing down the novel. Wilson also uses this approach when talking about the UK. In piecemeal flashbacks and news items we find a country riven with racism, torture, and surveillance. It feels a constant evil blob of power pulling for Lina and prepared to do anything just to get some answers. The reader gets a sense of something that Lina really can’t beat but is instead going to have to be very careful to deal with or risk losing the remaining parts of her life. This is incredibly skilled worldbuilding done sideways on with enough clues given that you can piece together various characters’ lives without the mass paragraphs of exposition other writers sometimes use too much.
The other delight in this novel is how skilfully it shifts form from chapter to chapter. It moves from science versus myth to spy games to intense family conflicts and each time with ease. These changes always feel organic as the story weaves its plot strands together towards its epic finale. Wilson’s absolutely gorgeous prose really works when painting the picture of this rural environment not with simple beauty but a sense of wildness where anything can happen be it human violence, old gods, hidden spies, or powers you don’t understand. The sense of a world that no one can truly understand but one that testing Lina in several ways to decide as to what is the right thing to do. When that tension finally explodes as a huge storm sweeps the area, we find anything can happen and the moral compass of all the characters is fully tested to the limit.
Reading This Is Our Undoing was a delicious reading experience. A world that pulls the reader in, characters you constantly fear for and a sense that anything can happen all made this a story I could not wait to return to repeatedly over the weekend that I was reading it. Haunting, beautiful, thoughtful, and surprising story that fans of speculative fiction need to get a hold of and gives us an author I think we should definitely be paying attention to in the future. One of the best debuts of the year!
