It was my eldest granddaughter’s partner (they’re to become parents next month) who recommended this interesting novel to me. He is a bookish chap and has gradually become one of the many people with whom I often chat about reading. And, given that he’s half a century younger than me and male, it’s surprising how often our tastes and interests coincide.
The Memory Police (2020) is set on a fictional Japanese island at some point in the not too far distant future. Memories are illegal. And for a long time random things – roses, hats, specific fruits, photographs, novels and eventually body parts – have been being forcibly made to disappear one by one and erased from memory. The titular Memory Police are ruthless enforcers of this policy so we’re somewhere between George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty Four and Franz Kafka’s Metamorphosis with nasty Stasi undertones.
The narrator is an unnamed female (shades of Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca) who lives alone and writes novels – until novels are “disappeared”. Her friends are her publisher whom she calls R and “The Old Man” who is the widower of her old nurse. They trust each other implicitly and R retains the gene which means his memories are intact. Once – no plot spoilers – he and the narrator are obliged by circumstances to spend a lot of time together he works hard at trying to re-programme her brain to enable her to recover some of her lost memories. And that, of course, is subversive, illegal and dangerous.
Meanwhile the Old Man lives on the shabby, damaged boat he used to run as a ferry to the mainland until such trips, concepts and ideas were “disappeared”. The use of “disappear” as a transitive verb is sinister and effective. Then natural forces change things. And I really admired Ogawa’s invocation of landscape, weather and climate.
So what is all this really about? I found myself thinking a lot about Orwell’s “thought police”. If you condition or coerce people into believing there are things they must not say or think – and that happens all around us every day – then memories become distorted and you lose trust in your own mind and judgement. Patrick Hamilton’s play Gaslight (1938) of which I coincidentally saw and reviewed a production at about the same time as I was reading this novel, makes the same pretty terrifying point. If you bully people insistently enough you can make them believe anything – as every tyrant understands very well from King Herod to … well, supply your own names. This is not the place for me to engage in international political judgements.
In The Memory Police R represents the central voice of reason, morality and humanity. We need people like him at every level of every society.
Next week on Susan’s Bookshelves: One Hundred Years of Lenni and Margot by Marianne Cronin
