A Change in Altitude

Anita Shreve

Hachette

Otago Daily Times, 2009

Anita Shreve’s latest novel, A Change in Altitude, follows a newly-married American couple through a year that can only be described as ‘life changing’.  Through the eyes of the wife, Margaret, we witness as her belief in a safe, orderly world and her place in it are thrown into disarray.  When her husband, Patrick, suggests they spend the year in Kenya so he can conduct field research (he is a doctor specialising in equatorial medicine), it seems like a great adventure, but things begin to go wrong from the start-a stolen wallet, the theft of car tyres, a break in at their rented cottage.

When they are taken under the wing of wealthy English couple Arthur and Diana it seems as if security has been regained, but the respite is brief. During an ascent of Mount Kenya, Diana slips and plunges to her death, an event for which Margaret blames herself and an attribution of fault that Patrick shares, although he refuses to discuss it once they leave the mountain.

Struggling with her guilt, and faced with the unvoiced accusations of her husband, Margaret watches helplessly as her marriage begins to unravel.  In response she throws herself into work, finding herself a job as a photographer for the Kenya Morning Tribune and coming face-to-face with the social and political realities of post-colonial Africa.  These glimpses of Kenyan life are as, if not more, compelling than Margaret’s struggles to reconcile with herself and with Patrick, grounding the fiction in something deeper than the characters themselves.