London

London in the novel is a city of departures and unfinished attachments: Wanda Phinn strips away the life she has built there to seek a permanent place at the Nature Absorption Academy, while Shirley leaves its disappointments for the island and is eventually offered a way back as the Academy’s London recruiter. The city is not simply a point on the route to the center. It is the measure of what both women hope to escape, and the place where the Academy’s promise is first encountered and later put to work.

The city Wanda leaves

Wanda had emigrated from Jamaica alone among her family and rented a room on the outskirts of London. She had quit her job and, before leaving, canceled her subscriptions, including Internet access, and sold nearly everything she owned: her computer, radio, television, furniture, and some clothes. London had become, in her own reckoning, a finished chapter, with nothing there to keep her. Her plan was to complete the Academy’s introductory course and then be inducted as a permanent resident. The scale of that severance makes her journey more than a change of address: she has arranged her life so that returning to her former circumstances would mean rebuilding almost from nothing.

That apparent freedom from London also makes Wanda vulnerable. She has no next of kin in England, and Pirjo Abanshamash Dumuzi reasons that the woman has probably left no friends or colleagues who would know where she intended to go. Pirjo has deleted information linking herself to Wanda from her hard drive and believes that a chance sighting during their journey from Kalmar will not be remembered. In this calculation, London matters through the absences it has created: the sold computer, canceled connections, and lack of an obvious local network make Wanda seem easy to erase. Her preparations to leave are therefore both evidence of her desire for a new life and part of the conditions that allow Pirjo to imagine concealing her disappearance.

London is also where Wanda’s longing for Atu first takes shape. Her hair carries the memory of his hands brushing over it during their encounter in the city, and the recollection remains a driving force for her later pursuit of that feeling. The detail joins London to an intimacy that Wanda wants to recover: she has not merely left a place but is moving toward the person and imagined future associated with her first meeting with Atu. That private attachment sits uneasily beside the practical completeness of her departure, which has removed the ordinary ties that might have anchored her to the city.

Shirley’s London disappointments

For Shirley, London is a place of disappointments accumulating in ordinary, sharply defined episodes. Paco Lopez, a Spaniard who had spent a week going home with her for sex and homemade food, produced a worn engagement ring before saying goodbye and thanking her. Her employer fired her instead of a cafeteria worker who had been there only three months. A diet that had promised a ten-kilogram loss seemed to have the opposite effect, and Wanda, despite her grand promises, sent no postcard. Shirley’s first concern for her absent friend eventually faded, as did her hope that the people and circumstances around her would improve.

The city’s Christmas lights do not soften that sense of abandonment. Shirley is stuck in an apartment block in one of London’s most deprived areas, watching the lights flicker in shop windows and children smile. She calls her parents to see whether they might welcome her home for a few months, presenting the idea as a wish to spend Christmas and New Year with them. They see through the approach; the welcome she hopes for is not reciprocated. London thus becomes the setting of a double exclusion: Shirley cannot imagine a better future in the city, but neither can she count on her family to receive her elsewhere.

Wanda’s silence makes the island seem like an answer to Shirley’s own stalled life. Shirley imagines her friend happy in the mystical world where Atu reigns, and wonders why Wanda could make the leap when she herself had neither more money nor an invitation. Nine months earlier, however, Shirley had been beside Wanda on the staircase of a flashy house in exclusive Chelsea, excited like a child before Christmas. The encounter with Atu had felt more consequential than Shirley’s earlier attempts at self-improvement, such as stress-management courses or trying to communicate with spirits. She had joked with Wanda afterward about the impression Atu made on her; Wanda, Shirley recognized, had been absorbed more completely. London is therefore not just the dreary life Shirley wants to escape. It is also where she first encountered the possibility that escape might lead somewhere.

Departure and return

When Shirley finally leaves, she travels from Kalmar train station by bus toward the island and continues on foot. She expects the people she met in London to welcome her, but worries that Wanda may regard her arrival as an intrusion and that their friendship may already be over. Her decision to go nonetheless rests partly on the memory that she introduced Wanda to Atu’s world. The journey reverses the direction of Wanda’s earlier departure: what Wanda had undertaken alone, Shirley now attempts by following the path she believes her friend opened.

After Shirley reaches the Nature Absorption Academy, the possibility of returning to London becomes painful rather than straightforward. She fears that Pirjo may be out to get her, yet has decided to stay at the center whatever the cost. Going back, in her view, would mean unemployment, poor housing, and a return to habits and casual encounters she does not want. She has written to her parents at least ten times during her stay; their only reply is a postcard telling her not to write while she remains at what they call an unchristian place. The city she left is thus inseparable from the weak support available to her there. Her choice to remain is made under pressure, but it is still a choice against a future she knows and rejects.

The Academy’s London office

London returns in a changed form when Pirjo offers Shirley a job recruiting course members from the Academy’s London office. The offer comes after Shirley learns she will not be admitted to the inner circle or allowed to stay permanently. Pirjo presents the alternative as paid, commission-based work, notes that London usually has many applicants, and adds that a small apartment comes with the position. It addresses the specific insecurity of Shirley’s return: she expects to be out of work, and the proposed job promises both an income and a place to live. Yet it is also a redirection, not the permanent belonging she had sought at the center.

Shirley accepts a role that recasts her earlier place in the story. She will welcome new applicants in London as Wanda was once welcomed, arrange Atu’s stays, and make him comfortable when he visits the office. The staircase in Chelsea, once the threshold to an exciting encounter Shirley shared with Wanda, becomes a pattern she is now expected to reproduce for strangers. She has gained a position connected to the institution that once refused her full membership, but the unresolved question of Wanda’s whereabouts remains beside her new duties. London’s final significance is this uneasy return: the city offers Shirley a practical foothold, while the Academy’s promise of transformation continues to depend on people being drawn away from the lives they leave behind.