Atomic Coffin by Benedict Anning review: 'has both pace and ideas'
This first-rate novel about a mysterious submarine combines genre thrills with serious philosophical questions, writes Stuart Kelly
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Publishers do love the x meets y endorsement, and I confess that I have been guilty of that particular shorthand in the past myself. This novel by Lothians-based author Benedict Anning sports two. Firstly, “If Philip K Dick and Stephen King had a lovechild at the height of Cold War tensions, it would look something like this”, from the writer Nicholas Binge, and then “As if John Hornor Jacobs wrote The Hunt for Red October immediately after watching Event Horizon” from author Ally Wilkes. And do you know what? Anning more than deserves the comparisons as this is a first-rate work. If I were a literary sommelier I would be advising you to detect the strong but not overpowering fumes of HP Lovecraft, tempered by the enigmatic eeriness of Arkday and Boris Strugatsky via Tarkovsky, but with just a soupçon of Stanisław Lem, and the distinctive Ramsey Campbell tang of locating horror in the “modern” rather than the nostalgic, all combined with the nihilism of Thomas Ligoti or Brian Evenson. In other words, this is a serious book. It has pace and ideas, genre thrills combined with philosophical questions.
Our central character is Heidi Sperling. It is East Germany during the 1980s and her codename is “Thistle”. Her espionage has hitherto been providing low level data to the British, but Heidi has come across something with such serious potential repercussions and consequences it is necessary for her to leave her lover Sabine and be exfiltrated to the West. Her intel involves a Soviet Typhoon class nuclear submarine, only known as TK-15, only nobody seems to know about TK-15. It has been silent, unmoving and undetected for three years between Iceland and Scotland, and out of nowhere has sent a signal: “active”. Hastily stowed aboard the Royal Navy sub HMS Viking, since she is fluent in Russian, Heidi is to accompany the crew as they investigate the vessel. Is it some kind of Communist Marie Celeste, some experimental site on the longevity of submersion and the psychology of confinement, or something completely unexpected? Unfortunately, it is neither of the first two.
Anning captures and deploys the claustrophobia and the paranoia of the situation well. It is useful to have a narrator like Heidi whose own bewilderment chimes with the reader being startled. On arriving aboard the Viking we read: “The first thing that struck her was the stench. The absolute stench. Unsurprising, when she gave it a second thought. Squeeze a hundred sweating men into a container of poorly recycled air, add stale cigarette smoke and a constant cycle of meals and farts, and you get something quite f***ing spectacular. A salty-sweet, sulphurous musk.” Having recently reviewed Elaine Thomson’s excellent Saltwater, it raised a wry smile that a 19th century ghost story should share with a 20th century horror story a similar superstition about the inadvisability of women on working boats. The background sexism is as noxious as the physical smells.
Anning tips a wink to the reader early on when Heidi is going through her bootleg cassettes and Walkman – a nice period touch – and is especially keen to keep hold of Jefferson Airplane’s “Surrealistic Pillow”. The song “White Rabbit” from that album is referred to immediately after, and this certainly is a novel of rabbit-holes.
The decision to have Heidi as queer is not some capitulation to contemporary concerns. It is crucial to the narrative that Heidi is alert to cues and clues that others might miss, that she is hyper-alert to the subtext and the unsaid. Her antennae are always attuned to the “just not quite right”-ness of things. This is significant in that – without giving away too much of the plot – whatever is on TK-15 is able to manipulate perceptions and reality. The reader has to be as disorientated and discombobulated as the characters. The descriptions of the altered state of things are powerful: “Is this how she remembered it? What did she remember? It wasn’t real. This isn’t real. Her vision is vignetted” (I adore that neologism) “her heart won’t settle, won’t quit. Breath is nauseous. Sickly. Unreal. She’s going to faint. She’s going to die. She’s already dead”. There is a real skill to capturing in the rhythm of the prose itself the feeling of a panic attack or intense anxiety.
Heidi refers to the TK-15 as a “mirror maze” or a “mirror coffin”, and there’s almost a hint of TS Eliot’s “wilderness of mirrors”. Anning shows a commendable degree of restraint – I have often thought that the difference between “horror” and “splatter” is actually in the description of monsters and monstrosities. Here, the fears of suffocation, drowning and immurement far outweigh any kind of simple “reveal”. It is in the tradition of cosmic – one might almost say metaphysical – horror: “Vickers is with her, somewhere in the dark. No, not dark – something worse. Oblivion, Cosmic void. This thing, this place, this anti-death. It’s place and person and neither”.
Although it is genuinely chilling, the novel does have a moral core. In the opening chapter, Stasi agents inform Heidi that in exchange for her co-operation they will allow her to kill herself. Suicidal ideation, and suicide attempts, are central to the novel. Perhaps the scariest aspect is that in this world – totalitarian, trapped or otherwise – suicide is the only available expression of freedom.
Atomic Coffin, by Benedict Anning, Bantam, £20
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