No-one is going to buy this unless they’ve already read The Girl with All the Gifts, and so everyone reading it is going to feel their heart sink a little as they realise that we’re back in the Rosalind Franklin, the armoured mobile lab which shows up in central London in Girl and becomes Miss Justineau’s prison. We all know that Rosie winds up abandoned in the middle of London with its crew dead or missing, so we know that the forecast for the people in this book is … not promising.
Just like Girl, this is a book that I read in short stretches, tip-toeing through the prose and pausing at intervals to steel myself in case the next chapter turned into Benjie’s world of blood. Rosie is doomed, and the suspense is just how doomed the crew are, and to a lesser extent how Rosie winds up abandoned in London.
How Rosie winds up in London is almost irrelevant; Carey dashes it off in a couple of pages after the main action of the book has unfolded. What matter is what comes before. The heart of Girl was the three cornered relationship between a child, a mother surrogate, and a weary soldier as they cross a devastated landscape. In and around that were other tensions; ambitious scientists with no morality left and semi-expendable grunts trying to keep the world at bay. Carey’s used essentially the same template, but put new characters into it.
Melanie has become Stephen Greaves, a teenage genius who might just be smart enough to figure out how the fungal infection works, but is so damaged by childhood trauma that he can’t explain it to anyone. Miss Justineau has become Samrina Khan, a scientist who has replaced Stephen’s mother in every way that matters, and Sgt Parks has become Col Carlisle, the military leader of the expedition. They occupy the same spaces on the emotional board of the book, and yet they’re nothing like the characters from the first book, and they work out their redemptions and sacrifices in very different ways.
It’s a very satisfying book, especially for a prequel. It fills in points that the earlier (but later) book didn’t bother with, but it doesn’t make a point of explaining all the back story. What we’re told is what the story itself needs, nothing more. That’s something I can really respect having sat through Hollywood’s notions of how a prequel ought to work. But what made me put the book down at the end in complete satisfaction was the ending, which closes out both the story of the survivors of this book, and the story of the survivors of Girl. Harder hearts might argue that the ending is pat and sentimental, but for me it gave the good guys the ending they deserved.
The ending might even, for all I know, be some kind of sequel hook. What’s been done will stand on its own, and I thought the same thing when there was just Girl. So if Carey comes out with a third book one of these days, it might really be something.
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