The closest comparison I can draw between Under Story and another book is with The Time Traveler’s Wife.
Both are high-concept love stories, speculative fiction but worn lightly, so that the rupture in the space-time continuum they hinge around is really just a way to explore relationships, grief and healing.
And like The Time Traveler’s Wife, Under Story will leave you scratching your head, trying to work out if the reality constructed by author Chloe Benjamin actually hangs together, or if she’s just betting you won’t be able to tell.
To say much about the plot would be a spoiler, since the novel has a mid-point twist that essentially upends everything you’ve just read.
What I can say is that I loved it, falling wholeheartedly for the two broken people at its centre. Scientists Laurel and Eli – he a nerdy Jewish physicist, she a mushroom expert – are divorced after a terrible event, when they both find themselves in Antarctica.
The earlier part of the book – Laurel’s life at the remote McMurdo Research Station, her ragtag gang of Antarctic friends, and her childhood helping her parents run an orchard – is engaging enough; I’d have happily read a whole book about this alone. There are perhaps too many digressions exploring her past as an academic studying mycology; some I did glaze over, although they’re part of the bigger story she is telling. But lonely, sad Laurel regains her spark amidst the snow and ice, as you discover more about the trauma she is attempting to move past.
Then Eli arrives, and he’s not the good-for-nothing ex you might assume. It is clear they have unfinished business, so when they find a chance to revisit it – thanks to some complex metaphysics, a few helpful coincidences and an implausible confidence – they take it.
And, to paraphrase, here comes the science fiction bit. Despite this not being my preferred genre, I was hooked; totally invested in the complex universe Benjamin sets up and how Laurel and Eli navigate it. It is that rare thing: a novel that I would have gladly read had it been 100 pages longer. In fact, I was devastated to leave them when I reached the final page.
Benjamin’s previous book, The Immortalists, about four Jewish siblings who learn their death dates as children, was similarly immersive, and has stayed with me. Both books work because while they rest on a premise, it feels fully realised, rather than gimmicky.
Benjamin is a natural storyteller who never forgets the humans at the heart of her plots. And Under Story is a thrilling, gorgeous book – albeit one that may boggle your mind a little.
Under Story, by Chloe Benjamin, is published by Headline Publishing Group
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