The Field: The Everyday Fear

The tundra—a treeless plain with an underlayer of permafrost—is most commonly found, like many very cold things, in Russia. The threat of straying too far from the city and ending up there haunts every word of Disappearing Earth, a debut mystery novel by Julia Phillips. Disappearing Earth is set in Kamchatka, a sparsely populated and difficult-to-reach peninsula along the Pacific Ring of Fire, where tundra and active volcanoes coexist in a dramatic landscape. The “locked-room effect” of this setting adds an intensity to the central story: the kidnapping of two small girls from the capital city, Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky, and the ripple effects this event has on the wider peninsular community. Phillips’s real interest, though, is in the everyday anxieties of being a woman—anxieties she conveys against the backdrop of a confined landscape, where the idea of disappearing seems at once impossible and inescapable.

Disappearing Earth begins as the girls, two Russian sisters named Alyona and Sophia Golosovskaya, aged eleven and eight, are abducted by a stranger on their walk home from school. Despite the thriller setup, Phillips focuses less on their disappearance than on the effect it has on Kamchatka’s multiethnic patchwork of communities. There’s a sharp divide between the ethnic Russians who dominate the capital city and the indigenous communities who live in the resource-scarce regions farther north. This division is deepened by the difference between the robust police investigation and media circus surrounding the girls’ disappearance, and the shoddy handling of a similar case involving Lilia, a teenage girl from Esso, a remote village populated largely by people from the indigenous Koryak and Even communities.

Phillips weaves these twin mysteries into the everyday lives of women in Kamchatka, from the school secretary to a customs officer working at the port. Using a structure that resembles that of a short-story collection, Phillips deftly conveys the impact a high-profile crime case can have on a community, particularly when the victim is female. Case in point: one chapter follows Ksenia, a university student from Esso whose controlling boyfriend uses the disappearance of the Golosovskaya sisters to track her movements even more closely. In another chapter, we meet Oksana, a PhD candidate at the volcanological institute who witnessed the kidnapping but did not realize what she was seeing. Her guilt, mixed with the authorities’ refusal to believe her (maybe, they conjecture, the girls went swimming and drowned), echoes the overall...