Book Review of Tell Me An Ending by Jo Harkin

*  * * * *

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