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The Premise Every 179 days, a young man named Robbie forgets everything about his past due to a rare neurological condition. Thus the premise of the novel thrusts us into fantasy amnesia, a whole sub-genre of amnesia fiction in itself, and fine by me. When we meet Robbie, he knows his condition exists because one of his former selves has written a letter for him explaining his situation. What’s more, he has prepared himself a strategy; a set of strict instructions on how to live his life until the next forgetting. The herculean project he undertakes in his living room—setting up 83,790 dominoes into tower structures—takes all his concentration, energy and time. It is designed to keep him entirely on his own. Robbie has a maxim to help keep his sense of self intact: “Keep to yourself to keep yourself.” At the novel opening, there are only twelve days left before Robbie’s next forgetting. His domino task is proceeding smoothly, until a pretty young woman named Julie turns up. She… Read More »The Beautiful Fall

The Room 15 story Imagine you’re holding a party in summer one minute, and suddenly you’re alone in the street with snow falling, blood running from your neck and on your hands. What has happened in-between times, you have no idea. This is an early scene from Room 15. The reader sees the world from the narrator, Ross Blackleigh’s perspective, and so, like him, we find out through a series of surreal experiences that 18 months of his life have been wiped clean from his memory. Ross is a detective inspector in the midst of a murder investigation. He soon remembers his police work and identity, just not what’s occurred in the last year and a half. What’s more, someone is trying to kill him. In order to solve the murder of a nurse—whose last phone call was to him—it is crucial for Ross not to let on to those around him that he has trouble with his memory. Father and son complexity As someone who had profound amnesia myself,… Read More »Room 15

Alice Howland is a linguistics expert and professor teaching at Harvard University, thus when she forgets what the word ‘lexicon’ means while delivering a lecture, it is more telling than if someone else were to have forgotten it. So begins 50-year-old Alice’s downward slide into early-onset Alzheimers in the novel Still Alice, by Lisa Genova. The book was a New York bestseller in 2007, and the film adaptation (2014), won Julianne Moore a string of awards, including an Oscar for her role as Alice Howland. When I realised what Still Alice was about, I didn’t want to go there. As someone who woke one day in 1991 with full-scale retrograde amnesia, vestiges of which dog me to this day, I don’t like contemplating the possibility of getting a cognitive degenerative disease. So what eventually changed my mind? I realised my reviews here are not meant to be about my own case. I am exploring what other people have created in books and films about human forgetting and remembering. Still Alice… Read More »Still Alice

If you think the first English detective novel, written in Dickens’s day, would be too dated to bother reading, think again. The Moonstone remains to this day a cracking good yarn, offering engaging and colourful characters, a dark mystery tinged with the exotic and laden with social critique, plenty of suspense and an unexpected ending. Right to the final pages, the question remains: who dun it? A precursor Edgar Allen Poe had several pivotal crime mystery short stories out by the time The Moonstone appeared in 1868, but being a full-length novel, Wilkie Collins landed the title grandfather of the detective novel. The Moonstone set many of the ground rules for the popular genre it spawned. These include an English country house robbery; a ‘locked-room’ puzzle; a cast of eccentric characters, each potentially with a motive; bungling rural police; the entrance of a celebrated, skilled detective; numerous red herrings and false leads; the reader being granted all the clues to solve the crime at the same time as the detective;… Read More »The Moonstone

As I read Pew my opinion of it swung wildly. One minute I thought it ground-breaking and brilliant, the next it disappointed. I do not usually have two minds about books, but then Pew is not your usual book. The premise The first-person narrator is an amnesiac with no idea of their past, their age, cultural or ethnic background. Furthermore, they may or may not know what gender they are, but either way they are not letting on. People in the book who meet them come up with different answers. Pew very rarely speaks, so such questions are left to guesswork by other characters. The reader is often none the wiser. This shape-shifting character, stumbles into a picturesque Bible-belt town in the US a week before its annual ‘forgiveness festival’, in which its citizens full of righteousness and zeal will reach the point of hysteria.The novel opens when our protagonist is woken on a church pew by one of the town’s prominent Christian families. The family promptly names them Pew.… Read More »Pew