Book Review of Tell Me An Ending by Jo Harkin

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An absorbing novel about trauma and memory.

This is a well thought-out story about the impact of the fictional technology of memory editing on the lives of some well-drawn and interesting characters. That technology is shown to have some strengths and some value, but the key limitation is that people will only pay thousands of pounds to edit out a memory which really troubles them, which means that almost every patient is troubled and unstable in some way. The technology is also open to exploitation by organised crime, but is this actually abuse when it removes the motivation for killing someone?

Most of the characters have opted not to know that their memory has been edited, and this raises problems of its own, such as attempts to get further edits to deal with the problems left behind by the first. And that’s before evidence emerges that the edits are potentially reversible. It’s a tale of problems posed by technology, to which moral solutions have to be found.

The other message of this novel is that a “peaceful life” could be an oxymoron for some individuals and that they may feel they have to choose between the two. That’s a realisation which stands independently of the technological environment of this novel.

I recommend this novel with five stars mainly because it shows that obliterating a traumatic memory may simply leave a patient ill-equipped to cope with the after-effects of that trauma. I have no confidence that the technology described here is going to remain fictional forever, or even for very long, so it’s worth thinking about before it all comes to pass.

Tell Me An Ending by Jo Harkin is published in the UK by Random House on the 12^th of May 2022

Book Review of Dear Little Corpses by Nicola Upson

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An idyll shattered on the cusp of war.

This competent historical novel, set at the beginning of the Second World War, was read and reviewed even as the opening stages of the war in Ukraine were unfolding. But the atmosphere it evokes is quite different:

Britain in September 1939 may have been about to endure a siege by U-boat in the following years, but it was not under siege yet. Wages and living standards may seem quite poor to us, but they were so much better (and so many more people were receiving them) than in the period just after the Great War or in the Great Depression that other authors (who were there at the time) would come to look back at 1939 as a mini golden age. It was even possible to fly to America (“from Southampton” i.e. by flying boat), something that had only just happened and which (though the NAZIs did not realise this in time) completely changed the balance of power in the world. On the one hand, most of the characters in the story are anxious about the impending war, but on the other hand the little luxuries that make life bearable are still widely available (after a long period where they couldn’t be afforded) even if international flights are an expensive novelty. The author captures these contrasts very well.

It is a murder mystery and the twists in the plot are quite major and come at just the right moment, rather than being constant and intended to keep the reader in a state of tension. There’s a difference, too, between feeling guilt and being guilty which is very shocking but also very true to life. The upheaval caused by the mass evacuation of children from the big cities provides an opportunity for two shocking crimes, but also an opportunity for justice to be served over other crimes which had gone unnoticed before that upheaval.

Two central older female characters are lesbians. This isn’t wokism: there were indeed lots of all female couples and households after the Great War and, unlike in the period after the Second World War, the situation was quietly understood and in general nothing was ever said. The two lesbian characters worry (only slightly) about a scandal, and it may be realistic that they should have worried, but the situation was commonplace; it was NEVER illegal and as George Orwell would one day remark, “the worst insult in the English language is ‘nosey parker!’” Or, at least it was before the Second World War and the Cold War. The author does not show people taking lesbianism for granted, but she is at least realistic in the way that none of her other characters choose to see anything amiss about two ladies old enough to have lost fiances, living together and being openly fond of each other.

This is a very good book.

Dear Little Corpses by Nicola Upson is published in the UK by Faber and Faber on the 19^th of May 2022