Skip to main content

Tell Me an Ending (SF) - Jo Harkin ****

The idea of wiping an event from someone's memory is a long-standing science fiction trope. It has cropped up regularly in both written SF and movies from Men in Black to Total Recall. Usually, it is approached from the viewpoint of the person whose memory has been altered as they slowly uncover the surprising realities of their past - but Jo Harkin has managed to revitalise the concept with a totally different approach - and the result is impressive.

More often that not, the memory wiping in fiction has been imposed and is a secret procedure. Here, and most like Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (which is referenced in this novel), it's all open and above board (or so it seems). But there are two particularly clever aspects to Harkin's take on the subject that raise it above an Eternal Sunshine clone. Firstly, a major focus is the company Nepenthe that undertakes the procedure - the uncomfortable juxtaposition of a modern corporate's attempted positioning as a caring organisation with human interactions is very well handled. 

Secondly, there are two types of procedure. Some customers know that they have had a memory removed. Others, though - brought in at night - no longer know that they have had the procedure. This opens up all sorts of interesting possibilities when it's discovered that the procedure can be reversed - and Nepenthe are legally forced to contact clients who don't know they've had a memory erased to ask if they want it restored. This is a brilliant twist that really drives the narrative.

There were issues. The book is structured as five strands that eventually intertwine. Each strand has a separate chapter with its own set of characters. This meant that after reading the opening chapter focussed on what is arguably the most important character, Noor, a psychologist at Nepenthe, we then have to read 85 pages before we return to Noor - by then, to be honest, I'd forgotten half of what happened in that first strand. Even at the end of the book I was still getting the different strands confused. Now, this might have been a clever meta-comment on the nature and fragility of memory - which is obviously a subject at the heart of the book - but it did make reading it unnecessarily hard work.

Apart from that, I did think that the old epithet of 'show don't tell' could have been followed better - there was a lot of internal monologue. And I disliked the affectation of formatting dialogue from the past without any speech marks, which just made it difficult to read.

However, these are relatively minor things. Harkin gives us a thought-provoking exploration of the grey area of whether we should undertake a procedure that a person thinks is good for them, but may not actually be (a consideration that could be applied to a number of existing socially-driven medical procedures), as well as helping us think about the nature of memory and how much it influences who we are as individuals. The final two sections are gripping as everything starts to come together and things that have been happening that were mysterious are finally explained. Despite my dislike of the structure, this is one of the best novels I've read this year.

Hardback:   
Kindle:  
Using these links earns us commission at no cost to you
Review by Brian Clegg - See all of Brian's online articles or subscribe to a weekly digest for free here
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

God: the Science, the Evidence - Michel-Yves Bolloré and Olivier Bonnassies ***

This is, to say the least, an oddity, but a fascinating one. A translation of a French bestseller, it aims to put forward an examination of the scientific evidence for the existence of a deity… and various other things, as this is a very oddly structured book (more on that in a moment). In The God Delusion , Richard Dawkins suggested that we should treat the existence of God as a scientific claim, which is exactly what the authors do reasonably well in the main part of the book. They argue that three pieces of scientific evidence in particular are supportive of the existence of a (generic) creator of the universe. These are that the universe had a beginning, the fine tuning of natural constants and the unlikeliness of life.  To support their evidence, Bolloré and Bonnassies give a reasonable introduction to thermodynamics and cosmology. They suggest that the expected heat death of the universe implies a beginning (for good thermodynamic reasons), and rightly give the impression tha...
Post a Comment
Read more

The Infinite Alphabet - Cesar Hidalgo ****

Although taking a very new approach, this book by a physicist working in economics made me nostalgic for the business books of the 1980s. More on why in a moment, but Cesar Hidalgo sets out to explain how it is knowledge - how it is developed, how it is managed and forgotten - that makes the difference between success and failure. When I worked for a corporate in the 1980s I was very taken with Tom Peters' business books such of In Search of Excellence (with Robert Waterman), which described what made it possible for some companies to thrive and become huge while others failed. (It's interesting to look back to see a balance amongst the companies Peters thought were excellent, with successes such as Walmart and Intel, and failures such as Wang and Kodak.) In a similar way, Hidalgo uses case studies of successes and failures for both businesses and countries in making effective use of knowledge to drive economic success. When I read a Tom Peters book I was inspired and fired up...
Post a Comment
Read more

The War on Science - Lawrence Krauss (Ed.) ****

At first glance this might appear to be yet another book on how to deal with climate change deniers and the like, such as How to Talk to a Science Denier.   It is, however, a much more significant book because it addresses the way that universities, government and pressure groups have attempted to undermine the scientific process. Conceptually I would give it five stars, but it's quite heavy going because it's a collection of around 18 essays by different academics, with many going over the same ground, so there is a lot of repetition. Even so, it's an important book. There are a few well-known names here - editor Lawrence Krauss, Richard Dawkins and Steven Pinker - but also a range of scientists (with a few philosophers) explaining how science is being damaged in academia by unscientific ideas. Many of the issues apply to other disciplines as well, but this is specifically about the impact on science, and particularly important there because of the damage it has been doing...
Post a Comment
Read more