As Gabrielle Fox, the narrator of Liz Jensen’s vivid new thriller, begins to confide in the man who is soon to become her lover, she invites him to consider what it might feel like “to go on long elaborate journeys of the imagination in which you can become whole new people. To realise that there’s nothing you can’t do, nobody you can’t be, if you allow your mind to float”. Gabrielle sounds as if she is describing the gifts (or tasks) of a novelist, but she is actually recalling the aftermath of a car crash, when she spent months lying in bed, drugged and dreaming, unaware that her lover and unborn son were dead and that she had been left paralysed.

The action of The Rapture takes place after she has left hospital. With “no man, no baby, no feeling below the waist, and no imaginable future”, Gabrielle, now wheelchair-bound, looks to resurrect her career as an art therapist. She finds work at a secure psychiatric hospital for disturbed teenagers, and there she encounters Bethany Krall.

The novel is set in a not-so-distant future (the 2012 Olympics have recently taken place) where violence and tension in the Middle East have increased, and Britain has seen a steep rise in the number of fundamentalist Christians awaiting the biblically prophesied end times. Bethany, the product of a mad, evangelical upbringing in which she was accused of harbouring the devil, has murdered her mother in peculiarly brutal circumstances.

Confined to the hospital and regularly blasted with the supposedly beneficial voltages of ECT, she has visions of disasters happening around the world and describes these to Gabrielle. Hurricanes blow through Bethany’s mind and volcanoes erupt there, but soon the catastrophes she imagines materialise in the real world. Gabrielle begins to believe that the girl has oracular powers that are genuine.

As a catalogue of natural disasters in distant countries seems to prove Bethany’s predictive powers, the therapist is also struggling to understand her unexpected new relationship with a physicist named Frazer Melville, and how it might change her life. She tells him of the alarming coincidences between her patient’s visions and the news bulletins. When Bethany foresees a vast tsunami drowning most of Britain, Frazer decides that the time has come to act. He and a band of scientific colleagues kidnap the girl from the hospital and the stage is set for a last act that looks likely to echo the fantasies of the fundamentalists.

Jensen has proved herself a skilful, witty writer in earlier novels, and The Rapture is often an absorbing embodiment and exploration of our fears about climate change. The matricidal teenage prophet at the heart of the story is a memorable character, at once unsettling and curiously vulnerable. Jensen cleverly spins out the tension the other characters feel between reason, which tells them that Bethany cannot be what she seems, and the mounting evidence that she is.

There are times, however, when the author appears to lose sight of the strongest elements in her story. It is difficult, for example, to sustain as much interest in the ups and downs of Gabrielle’s love affair with Frazer as Jensen seems to expect, when it is unfolding against the backdrop of potential Armageddon. When “a cataclysm on a scale that humans have never seen before” is about to take place, the relentless anatomisation of her narrator’s insecurities and jealousies is nothing but a distraction. Like one of Gabrielle’s post-crash dreams, The Rapture is a long, elaborate journey of the imagination but it takes too many unnecessary diversions to be a fully satisfying one.

The Rapture by Liz Jensen
Bloomsbury £16.99 pp346

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