Introduction

Summary

Liz Jensen's Otherworlds

LIZ JENSEN IS AN INCREASINGLY successful British contemporary writer, whose work has been translated into twenty languages. She is the author of eight novels to date, Egg Dancing (1995), Ark Baby (1998), The Paper Eater (2000), War Crimes for the Home (2002), The Ninth Life of Louis Drax (2004), My Dirty Little Book of Stolen Time (2006), The Rapture (2009) and The Uninvited (2012). These works range through a variety of subjects and styles. To give a brief overview, Egg Dancing tells the story of Hazel, the ultimately unemancipated late twentieth-century woman, whose husband is, unbeknown to her, using her in his genetic engineering experiment to create the perfect baby. Ark Baby, continuing the reproductive theme, traces the path of Tobias, half-man, half-monkey, and his discovery of his true identity, in the broad sense of the term—for this is a coming-of-age novel. The Paper Eater could be termed a fullblown utopia/dystopia, in that it charts the rise and fall of a human-made island, which is set up to treat the waste of the world in an artificial crater and billed as an ideal society. The fourth novel, War Crimes for the Home, takes up the theme of childbirth and child rearing in a different way: Gloria, from the perspective of the old people's home in which she has been placed in the run-up to her death, looks back on the Second World War and finally admits to having murdered one of the twins to which she gave birth on the day after ve (Victory in Europe) Day.

The Ninth Life of Louis Drax is a twist on the detective story: the eponymous Louis, aged ten, lies in a coma ward, victim of his mother's Munchausen's by proxy, and lives an inner life, at some hidden level of consciousness, until such time as he is able to accept the death of his father, another victim of his mother, and so “come back to life.”