The Summer of the Bear

In 1980 Germany, Cold War tensions are once again approaching the militaristic. There's a mole in the British Embassy, distrust has settled over the city of Bonn like a thin layer of dirt, even the most trusted officials are suspect. So when the dependable but clever diplomat Nicky Fleming dies suddenly after falling from the roof of the embassy, it’s all too easy to brand him the traitor. But was his death an accident, murder or suicide?

His wife, Letty, is left with nothing but scribbled notes found crumpled up on the floor of Nicky’s office: 'there are those, people close to you who will be hurt by what I have done…nevertheless, I believe that in the long run, my actions will benefit more people than they will harm… Forgive me, my darling, this has not been a decision taken lightly.’

Loaded words that allow the government cause to question both Letty and their eldest daughter, Georgiana, who had recently traveled with her father to East Germany. Though they find no real proof of treason, rumors abound and soon Letty and the children are forced from their residence under the shadow of Nicky’s suspected betrayal. She takes the children to the Outer Hebrides of Scotland where she herself spent much of her youth. It’s a remote island, quiet, and infused with an elemental beauty. Letty hopes time on the island will help them salvage what’s left of their family, but the isolation only serves to deepen the distance between them.

As Letty retreats into her grief and memories, each of the three children is left to deal with his/her own sadness alone. Seventeen-year-old Georgie struggles to balance her loyalty to her family and her father with the secret knowledge of her father’s dealings in the GDR, and with her fierce desire to escape to university. Middle child, Alba, has a sharp edge, using her anger and insensitivity like a shield against sadness. She tortures her brother, Jamie, teasing him about his learning disabilities and childish fantasies, and so bitterly fears her sister’s chance to leave for school that she burns her A-level results when they arrive at the house in Scotland. Jamie, in his clouded innocence, cannot grasp his father’s death. A very literal child, when told his father has gone to Heaven; Jamie looks for Heaven in the London phone book and is able to locate a so-called brothel. Truly believing that’s it’s THE Heaven, when he visits the proprietor and is told that his father’s not there, he’s led to think that his dad is still alive. And when he discovers that a lone bear has been marooned on the island, Jamie feels a strange connection to the beast and begins to believe that if his father really is dead, that the bear might in fact be his father. It makes sense: he knows people can be reborn as animals and he vividly remembers the time when he and his father went to the bear exhibit at a museum. Nicky told Jamie that the bear spoke 4 languages (the same four Nicky spoke) and that the bear liked to paint and fish (Nicky’s two favorite hobbies). He’s certain of the connection, and he soon becomes obsessed with finding the bear.

The bear is owned by a man called The Wrestler. He acquired the bear before it was even born and with his wife has raised it almost as though it were human. Because of its domesticity, the bear never developed its natural instincts and cannot survive in the wilderness—it doesn’t know how nor does it want to hunt, it isn’t adept at finding shelter, etc. Afraid and confused, the bear is slowly starving to death in a cave along the coast. When he spots the children, he’s vaguely aware of a connection to them, especially to the boy. And when he whispers to Jamie, Jamie whispers back. But the bear knows that people are out to capture him, and his fear keeps him hidden from the kids.

Letty continues to struggle through her confusion and sorrow, utterly blind to her childrens’ personal battles. She cannot help but think of the first moment she met Nicky, at a party where he cut in as she was dancing with his boss, Tom. Letty’s always felt badly about choosing Nicky over Tom, but it never seemed to hurt the men’s relationship. Nicky and Tom were best friends, though when Nicky approached Tom for help only a few months before his death, Tom refused. He will not tell Letty why Nicky needed help, what kind of danger he was about to put himself in, and if it could have anything to do with his death. Tom wants her to hold on to what she believes about Nicky, to convince her that it’s better if she stop trying to uncover what he was involved in and simply try to move on. But Letty refuses, and when she discovers an envelope containing two passport pictures hidden behind the canvas of one of Nicky’s paintings of a neighboring island’s loathsome nuclear missile range, she becomes even more confused. On the front of the envelope is scribbled “Everything and every event is pervaded by the Grace of God.” There are also strange codes written on the painting. At first they look to be paint color codes, but after checking through all his paint, Letty cannot match them. Her resolve begins to falter and she can’t help but suspect that Nicky was indeed involved in something sinister. She agonizes over the clues, but nothing makes sense. Though she’s still incredibly angry at Tom’s silence, she knows that she’ll have to approach him again if she’s ever to find out the truth about Nicky’s secret life. She also knows that Tom is the only person she can approach about the rumors of a second nuclear weapons facility, one that will be far too close to the family’s home.

When Tom arrives on the island, he finds a family in disrepair: Letty hasn’t been eating or sleeping well and she’s more desperate for answers than ever before; Georgie has just lost her virginity to a Syrian boy she only met a few days before; Alba has begun stealing from the local market and the Syrian boy’s father, and Jamie has run to the cliffs during a dangerous storm to find the bear. When Alba is caught stealing, Letty demands that she apologize, but Alba instead talks her sister into apologizing for her; in exchange, Alba must be sweet to Jamie for a number of weeks. But when Alba discovers that her mother’s been keeping secrets about her father (namely the notes found in the embassy), her rage gets the better of her. She finds the letter and is reading it at the kitchen table when Jamie bursts into the room exuberantly conveying his plans to find the bear who’s been spotted near the cliffs. Alba can’t stand his hopefulness and screams at him to get away from her. Though shocked by her baseless outburst, Jamie had always known Alba would return to hating him. He runs out of the house in a thunderstorm and heads to the cliffs. In her careless rage, Alba shouts that he can jump off them for all she cares. But when Jamie doesn’t return, Alba begins to panic and heads out to find him.

While Alba and Jamie are gone, Letty brings Tom back to the house. There he explains that in looking into the plans to build a new nuclear range, he looked into some peculiar files about the missile site already on the island. It states that the facility was not properly maintained and that hazardous materials have contaminated the waters and land around the island, threatening the health of its inhabitants. But the file isn’t signed, leading Tom to believe that it’s false; written up by Nicky to prevent the government from building again. Nicky had been involved with the cleanup of a similar plant called Schyndell. The Schyndell plant was in East Germany and the Russians had gone to great lengths to keep the truth behind the meltdown secret. Nicky didn’t want his wife’s island to incur the same repercussions. Letty and Nicky had been growing apart in recent months. He knew she was unhappy living in Bonn, and his attempt to curb the government’s plans was a way to pay her back for her sacrifices. Though British officials would have no way of telling who ordered the report, the fact that the diagnostics performed on the island’s water and soil quality could be accurate should lead them to open their own investigation before going ahead with another project—at least that’s what Nicky must’ve thought. In truth, Tom tells Letty that the government intends to suppress the findings and move on with building the new site. When Georgie comes back from her visit with the grocer’s son, Tom asks her to please reveal what she knows about Nicky’s trip to East Germany, that something must’ve happened there that could tie the story’s loose ends together. Georgie tells them that her father met with a man in a church. He handed the man papers and then later on the man was stuffed into a crawl space in their car and transported across the border. The man was a scientist that had information on the problems in Schyndell and he was about to be used as a scapegoat for the entire incident. Nicky, always rooting for the underdog and fighting injustice, knew that he had to save the man from such an unfair fate, and in return hoped that the man would reveal just what had gone wrong in Schyndell and help stop the government from erecting the new nuclear site in Scotland.

While the three discuss Nicky’s past, Alba reaches the cliffs. There, she finds Jamie has fallen over the edge and is perched precariously on a crumbling ledge. He’s smashed his head and cut his arms and legs. He regains consciousness after she begins shouting for him to stay still. But the ledge keeps giving under his weight. Jamie looks down and sees the bear directly below him. He can hear the bear beckoning to him, telling him to jump, promising, as his father once did to his mother during their courtship, that he will catch him. Jamie shouts up to Alba that he’s going to jump and then lets his body fall to the ground. Utterly terrified, Alba climbs down the cliff face after him. When she finally reaches him, Jamie is alive in the bear’s cave, though he’s bleeding profusely from his head. He explains that the bear caught him and has now run to get help, that the bear is their father. Alba knows she can’t leave Jamie there alone, so she takes her shawl, ties it like a hot air balloon or kite, and pushes it out through a hole in the rocks where it catches the wind and floats up toward the top of the cliffs.

When the bear reaches the top of the mountain, it’s exhausted. Six weeks of starvation have caught up with it and it no longer has the energy to go on. The bear watches as a man approaches it on a tractor and can’t even move when it feels the dart hit its skin and start to put it to sleep. But by drawing attention to the shoreline, the bear allows the men of the island to notice Alba’s signal and they’re able to climb down to save the children. Both are brought to hospital where they’re met with their mom, sister, and Tom. While he’s recovering, the doctors perform a battery of tests on Jamie and discover that he suffers from an irregular heartbeat called Cardiomyopathy, a potentially lethal condition that can cause the heart to stop and runs in families. When Letty hears this, she’s overcome; she realizes it was Nicky’s heart that killed him, that he was still the man she loved.