Aug 5, 2011 ARCHIVES | Entertainment | COLUMNS Bella Pollen
Atlantic Monthly
ISBN 978-0802119742
441 pages
$24
Reviewed by Clare Clark
Set during the Cold War in 1980, Bella Pollen's fifth novel, "The Summer of the Bear," is the story of Letty Fleming, a newly bereaved widow, and her three children. Tormented by the insinuations of the Foreign Office, which insists on treating her diplomat husband's death as suspicious, Letty flees the claustrophobic constraints of the British Embassy in Bonn, Germany, for her own childhood home in the remote Outer Hebrides, where she can grieve for him without restraint.
Her children, whom she has halfheartedly shielded from some of the more distressing aspects of their father's death, are left to roam the Scottish island and to cope with their loss as best they can. For Georgie and Alba, teenage girls on the cusp of adulthood, the situation is difficult enough, but Jamie, their 8-year-old brother, struggles most with his father's disappearance. Ferociously literal, the little boy has been told only that his father is "lost," and he is determined to find him. When an escaped grizzly bear takes up residence on the island, evading recapture by its owner, Jamie becomes increasingly convinced that the animal holds the key to his father's whereabouts.
Inspired by the real-life adventures of a domesticated bear in the Hebrides when Pollen was a child, "The Summer of the Bear" is a novel that defies classification. Told primarily from the viewpoints of Letty's three children, it is, on one level, a coming-of-age story that explores the world through the eyes of a doggedly innocent child. However, as the plot unfolds to reveal the truth behind the death of Nicky Fleming, it slips increasingly into the trope of a Cold War thriller, while the voice of the escaped bear lends a touch of fairy-tale whimsy.
These ingredients combine to make a souffle that never quite rises. Pollen is an acute observer of people and places, and her novel is full of vivid detail, from the sea anemone "stuck to the rock like a wine gum" to the creases in a man's earlobes that look "as though he had slept on a pillow of nails." A skilled dissector of the subtleties of sibling warfare, she is often very funny -- the po-faced ambassadress in Bonn takes Georgie's hand because "empathy was an emotion she had practised assiduously" -- but these qualities are inadequate compensation for a novel that struggles to find its center. Neither taut enough for a thriller nor profound enough for a satisfying examination of grief, "The Summer of the Bear" falls a little flat.
Clare Clark is the author of three novels, including "Savage Lands."
Copyright 2011 Washington Post Writers Group
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