Book review: A Change In Altitude

Published on Friday 20 November 2009 18:44

A Change In Altitude By Anita Shreve Little, Brown, 291pp, £16.99

BEING a prolific writer can count against you. One novel every three or four years is all well and good, but to be seen to be churning them out is the ultimate sin. The last few years have seen a new Anita Shreve novel on the shelves annually but, while bearing many of the stylistic and thematic hallmarks of her previous offerings, A Change in Altitude is simply too good to have been written in haste.

Margaret and Patrick are American newlyweds in their late twenties who, when we first meet them, have just arrived in Kenya. Patrick is a doctor specialising in equatorial medicine and Margaret a keen amateur photographer who finds a job on a Nairobi newspaper. They have taken the risk of a lifetime and, despite missing relatives at home and a couple of burglaries soon after arriving in the country, their gamble is paying off.

But they are about to take an even bigger risk. A rather domineering Patrick, in the opening line of the novel, announces: "We're climbing Mount Kenya. Not this Saturday, but the next." Oddly, although neither of them are climbers, his wife asks few questions, simply absorbing the information her husband gives her about who will climb with them (their landlords, Arthur and Diana, and a Dutch couple), where they will camp, what preparation they will need to do and that "parts of it will be rough". "I'd better buy hiking boots," Margaret adds, passively.

But the decision to climb Mount Kenya is a catastrophic one. On a glacier miles above sea level, a momentary loss of concentration leads to a tragic accident that changes the lives of all who witness it.

For Margaret, who blames herself for the catastrophe, and through whose eyes the story is told, a journey of self-discovery lies ahead of her. But she must also discover who her husband – a man she thought she knew – really is, and work out whether their fledgling marriage can survive.

Like Shreve's previous novels, A Change in Altitude is ultimately concerned with how a single moment in time, a single incident, can change the course of people's lives. Does that make her a formulaic writer? Possibly. But the emotional power of watching a young couple battling to mend their tattered partnership, and a woman grappling with what she does and does not feel anymore, is undeniable.

There are, stylistically, faults here. It is hard to place the action temporally: a fleeting reference to Jimmy Carter is the only way of rooting it to the 1970s, but so momentary is the mention that it could easily be missed.

The dialogue is frequently false and stiff, with Margaret coming out with far too many clumsily-executed phrases like "Yes. No. Maybe" and "No. Maybe. A little" in answer to questions. For a writer with Shreve's experience, there are far more inventive ways of representing indecision in a character than to have them utter these very unnatural, stilted phrases.

And in some ways, Margaret's character is a confused one even before the accident on the mountain. She takes offence whenever the rather overbearing Arthur makes reference to "taking care of her", and yet this is from the same woman who blindly accepted her husband's commandment that they were to climb within the fortnight a mountain which each year claimed the lives of half a dozen people.

One tell-tale sign that Shreve is a mass-market writer is the lack of credit she sometimes gives her reader. Whether it be in her characterisation, the imagery she uses or in the dialogue, there are many moments when the reader has certainly grasped the point and yet continues to have it underlined for them. And then underlined again for good measure.

As accessible, uncomplicated, truly gripping fiction though, Shreve's 15th novel works just as well as so many of her others. The plot speeds along, uncluttered, and it is impossible not to get wrapped up in the young couple's horror.

This is the sort of fiction that compels you to go a stop further on the bus than you really need to. It may not have the power to occupy your thoughts for days after you've finished it, but while you're reading it, it's got you between its teeth.