Samantha Harvey’s debut occupies a territory somewhere inbetween Kazuo Ishiguro’s “The Unconsoled” and Mark Haddon’s “The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night Time”. Like the former, the reader is plunged headlong into a confusing, surreal mindscape in which nothing is as it seems and nobody is to be trusted. Like the latter, at the same time we are presented with a brutally honest portrayal of a terrible mental disorder. Harvey’s novel has the potential to do for Alzheimer’s what Haddon’s did for Asperger’s.
Each chapter is divided into two. The first portion is in the “present” - we meet Jake, a retired architect, and witness, from his point of view, the extent to which his deteriorating mind is affecting his day-to-day life. The second portion tells us a “story” - we are presented with a nugget from Jake’s memory. Not from his past, from his memory. The result of this is that everything is opaque - the reader can never be sure as to when an event took place, or even if it ever took place at all. Quotes and experiences are attributed variously to different characters. People who apparently died long ago weave in and out of the story seemingly at random, and some details never become clear. Memory can never be trusted, and our narrator is therefore supremely unreliable. His mental downfall is harrowing and tragic. As one character puts it, “you don’t need a memory to feel trapped”.
Though Harvey sometimes deploys metaphor and allegory to an eye-rolling degree, overall a gripping tone of murky melancholy is sustained. As the narrative progresses, Jake’s mental state deteriorates to such an extent that the prose itself is affected. Common, everyday objects poignantly lose their familiar labels and become childish compounds. Events from memory invade the present, trousers are placed in ovens, dogs are over-fed and the names and identities of loved ones are forgotten. To experience the fragmented, convoluted, confusing mess that is Jake’s frazzled mind is at once harrowing and frustrating. It’s a suffocating maze and if you find it too hard, Harvey seems to be saying, imagine how hard it is for her protagonist.
And here lies the novels greatest assett. Put simply, I have never come across anything that so effectively highlights the horrors of Alzheimer’s. If only in terms of the awareness it could raise for this awful condition, Harvey’s book should be praised. Everyone will be able to relate to the sadness at the heart of this novel- we all lose sight of people, of places, of dreams, and there is a tendency to take ones memory for granted. We think it will stay with us forever. As this book demonstrates so devastatingly, however, it is possible that we may outlive even our memories and lose sight of exactly that which makes us who we are. On putting it down, I was possessed by an overwhelming desire to make the absolute most of my life and of everyone in it.
