THE CHAMBER
Will Dean
Hodder & Stoughton (hodder.co.uk)
£20.00
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Ellen Brooke is a saturation diver, used to spending long periods in a confined space pressurised to one hundred meters beneath the sea and beyond. Her latest job is a month-long session in the North Sea, repairing oil drilling machinery designed to operate on the sea floor. Along with five other divers, she will spend the month in a chamber not much larger than a small minibus hidden deep in the bowels of Deep Topaz, a diver support vessel, or DSV, whose sole purpose is to keep her and her companions alive and working. As she returns in the diving bell from the seabed following her first shift, she finds that one of her colleagues is unresponsive and, despite the best efforts of Brooke and her crewmates, he doesn’t recover. Cancelling the job immediately, Dive Control begins the decompression process that will allow the divers to return to the world outside. The only problem? The process takes four days. Opening the hatch early could cause anything from explosive decompression – “raspberry jam” – to the divers suffering a severe case of the bends. So, here they remain, stuck in this confined space, while someone tries to pick them off one by one. But is it someone locked in the chamber with them, or someone on the outside, someone whose sole purpose is to keep them alive until the hatch opens in four days time?
It’s weird the things that pop into your head on unexpected triggers. I deliberatedly stayed away from any discussion of Will Dean’s new standalone novel, and went in knowing nothing beyond the tagline on the front cover: “Six Divers. Deep Underwater. Who will come out alive?” But, as I read, and the divers climbed into the cramped quarters that would be home for the next month, I realised that I’ve come across saturation diving in fiction before: Michael Crichton’s Sphere(which led to the passable 1998 Barry Levinson film starring Dustin Hoffman, Sharon Stone and Samuel L Jackson) uses the same premise to introduce an alien artefact located on the seabed. Dean’s The Chamber has a much more down-to-earth premise, but manages to follow in Crichton’s footsteps in describing the process in as much detail as possible without boring the reader to tears or leaving us scratching our heads. So, for this Crichton fan, we’re off to an excellent start, and we’ve only just started “blowing down”, as they say in the business (or so the author’s glossary – handily located before the story begins – informs me). Humanity are constantly striving to find new ways to live life on the very edge of danger; Will Dean seems determined to find the cleverest way possible to push them over that edge in the name of entertainment, and I’m glad to see it!
Let’s begin with a warning: if you are in any way claustrophobic, The Chamber may well be a book to avoid, or at least consume in bitesized chunks. From the moment Brooke and her companions step into the titular pressurised tin can and the hatch swings shut behind them, Dean instils in us just how small and cramped these living quarters are, and constantly reminds us both of just how small an area these six people inhabit and how dangerous their situation is – how quickly bacteria and viruses spread, how finely-balanced their life support is, how quickly it could all go wrong if a valve failed, or someone pushed the wrong button at the wrong time. When unexplained death is thrown into the mix and the divers start to suspect each other, and the people outside who are supposed to be keeping them alive and healthy, then we begin to feel some sense of the – quite literal – pressure these people are under. We feel the claustrophobia, the tension, the heat. We are, to all intents and purposes, a seventh body in that small room, taking up space and fearing for our lives, such is the power of Will Dean’s writing, and his ability to draw us into his story from the outset.
The majority of the novel takes place over the course of the four long days of the chamber’s decompression. As the divers wait for freedom, they tell each other stories – some for the first time, but many are old favourites, as these people have worked together on and off over the years, contractors who go where the work is, and work with whomever happens to be assigned to the job. Many, including our narrator, Brooke, have secrets that will be drawn out slowly as time passes and their situation becomes untenable, but these will come later. As the long wait begins they’re more interested in how Jumbo lost his fingers; how Tea-Bag got his nickname; was Mike actually a Navy SEAL in a past life, or is that all just rumours and speculation? There’s a camaraderie between these central characters, relationships built up over years, some of which follow them onshore, some that only exist in the no-time afforded by being locked up in a small capsule for weeks on end. We grow attached to the four surviving men as we see them through the eyes of Brooke, the only woman in the crew, but also one of only a handful of women working as a “sat diver” in the North Sea or, indeed, anywhere in the world. This is a very small community, and everyone seems to know everyone else and Dean makes us feel part of that while we inhabit the world of the chamber.
It occurred to me as I was reading The Chamber that in nine published novels – so far – Will Dean has yet to present a story from the male point of view. His Tuva Moodyson novels are obvious, but his three previous standalone novels, and now this latest one, have all featured female protagonists. To say that his representation of women is spot-on seems like something of an understatement. Certainly with The Chamber he tries to give us some sense of just how alien this world is to someone who is very much in the minority, someone who has probably had to work twice as hard as everyone else in that capsule to get where she is. It’s difficult to think of a female writer who could have provided a better insight into the mind of a woman in this situation. To complicate matters, we discover quite early on that Brooke may not be the most reliable of narrators, and that she may not be telling us everything she knows. This leaves everything open to a certain…ambiguity that, rather than frustrating the reader, makes the five-star ending even more satisfying.
The Chamber is claustrophobic and intense, a non-stop thriller that will probably leave you needing a massage to loosen your tensed muscles. We feel every minute that these divers spend in that pressurised capsule – and some of those minutes feel like hours or days without ever straying into the realms of boring or overplayed. Cracking this book open feels like the hatch on the titular chamber slamming closed: we’re in this for the duration, and it will be a looooong decompression before it’s finally finished with us. Fans of Will Dean’s standalone novels will know what sort of thing to expect, if not necessarily the subject. Fans of the Tuva Moodyson books should give it (and Dean’s other standalones) a shot – it combines his eye for a good mystery with his trademark dark humour and the occasional twist to produce something completely unexpected and totally unforgettable. If you’re completely new to this fantastic author, then there is no better place to start than one of his best novels to date (and that’s a very high bar, which seems to get higher and higher with each subsequent release). One of Britain’s greatest living storytellers, and one of the best novels you’ll read this year, without a doubt, and one not to be missed.
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