There are survival stories, and then there are stories about survival. One has characters overcoming a challenging situation or dire circumstance. In the other, characters continue to live, if not thrive, despite the structural or essential conditions they are up against. At first glimpse, Quan Barry’s THE UNVEILING is a survival story in both of those senses. But, as the reader journeys farther on with the protagonist, the more complex things become and the more fraught and perilous both types of survival seem to be. 

Striker is a Hollywood production scout who is about to celebrate her 40th birthday on an expensive Antarctic cruise as she looks at locations for a new film about Ernest Shackleton’s expedition. His early-20th-century exploration voyage got lost in the Weddell Sea before the crew was stranded on the ice, eventually camping on Elephant Island. Striker loosely following Shackleton’s path through the icebergs, along with a cadre of wealthy thrill seekers, is just the first and clearest red flag in the novel.

"THE UNVEILING is inventive, intense and darkly funny until it’s deadly serious. Barry unflinchingly takes on race, gender, belonging and longing in this beautifully written, messy, disturbing and sometimes very confusing novel."

Striker, the only solo traveler and Black person aboard the Yegorov, already feels distant from her shipmates. Still, she begins an affair with a member of the crew and keeps a scathing inner dialogue about the others onboard to occupy herself. She also wants to keep thoughts of the past, and the “migraines” for which she forgot to bring her medication, at bay. 

Signs and portends abound as Striker and 12 others leave the Yegorov for a kayaking excursion to get closer to the sea and its ice. The extended midwinter daylight and the reflections of the ice and water make for a surreal landscape. Then something terrible happens: a flash of light, a stench, and a change in the air. Pages later (Barry uses the visual of redacted lines to signify trauma and repressed thoughts), Striker comes back to herself to find that the kayaks are scattered and not everyone survived whatever it was that just happened. Several of the survivors navigate to a small island, inhabited by various birds, where they hope to be rescued. But reality, perhaps only tenuous for Striker before the disaster, begins to slip away from her. It is hard for her to tell --- and therefore impossible for readers to decipher --- what is real, what is memory, and what is hallucination. We learn more about her past and the guilt she carries as the hours go by on the island. 

Barry’s iceberg allusions and metaphors, not to mention the actual icebergs Striker and the others encounter, are apt. There is so much under the surface here. When on occasion the icebergs flip, revealing their massive undersides, it is catastrophic. Striker is the lens through which readers encounter the story, and it is no coincidence that she uses lenses in her work to place fantasy in reality. But she is unreliable, and as the novel unspools, Barry’s narrative becomes harder to hold on to.

Is Striker dying or injured? Is the island haunted, or is she imagining all the ghosts? Is this a psychological horror novel or a tale of trauma and mental illness? Or both? Barry doesn’t let readers off easily. Striker may be seeing and hearing things that aren’t there, but that doesn’t mean she never suffered in the past or isn’t suffering now. In fact, that suffering, trauma, illness and injury may be the only facts of the book. 

THE UNVEILING is inventive, intense and darkly funny until it’s deadly serious. Barry unflinchingly takes on race, gender, belonging and longing in this beautifully written, messy, disturbing and sometimes very confusing novel.