At first when you
read this book, it seems as if Sam Lloyd has started off in the same
place as John Fowles did with “The Collector”. But he goes in a
different direction and through a different set of dangers to arrive
in a different nightmare. This makes for a gripping read, if a
disturbing one.
Fowles was inspired
to write “The Collector” when he connected his literary studies,
which revealed that a “girl being held captive in a cellar” was a
common folk tale all over Europe, with a real case post WW2, where a
boy had kept a girl captive in an air-raid shelter. He realised that
this was not a myth, “urban” or otherwise, but something that
really happened, quite widely and perhaps quite often. Since The
Collector was published in 1963, there has been a steady stream of
real-life cases bearing out Fowles’ observation, but not all of
them have involved a psychotic individual culprit. Some, from
Australia and latterly the Netherlands, seem to involve sub-cultures;
some family-based or family-sized, others somewhat larger; cults if
you like. You get a long way into The Memory Wood before you realise
that it is about a sub-culture which in turn revolves around an
individual and by the time you know which of the characters this
actually is, you’ve almost reached the end. This book grips you,
not just to thrill and entertain, but to teach you that sub-cultures can be at least as dangerous as the “lone psycho” that our popular
culture leads us to fear more.
Along the way you
also learn that lost souls will go where they are led, until
something or someone intervenes and they go towards the light,
sometimes with the very last of their strength.
Matthew K. Spencer
2nd of November 2019.
No comments:
Post a Comment