What makes a human? Is it bone, flesh, or muscle? The brain and central nervous system? Or is it the words we think, speak or put down on paper? Strange Bodies is an unusual thriller with a literary bent that verges on unsettling at times.
Dr Nicholas Slopen has been dead for a year. So when he turns up at the door of an old girlfriend, looking and sounding different but otherwise identical, she doesn’t bat an eyelid. Perhaps it was a case of mistaken identity? People change, people age. But then he dies in her sight, leaving behind a USB drive on which he tells his unbelievable story, told from a secure psychiatric wing. Referred to as ‘Q’ by his therapist, it turns out he was sectioned for claiming to be the dead Nicholas Slopen despite looking nothing like the man. But he does seem to have an inordinate amount of knowledge about the dead man, and a fervent belief that he is him. Slopen (or Q) starts the story simply enough. He is hired by a mysterious businessman who’d like him to take a look at some letters and authenticate them. Then it drops him down the rabbit hole as he starts to discover a strange conspiracy, the soul of a 400 year-old-man trapped in a savant, and secretive Russian experiments with golems.
The book is extravagantly written, draped in literary references and dry wit, subtly peeling back the corners of the world allowing you to mull over the ideas it presents. I found myself Googling various Russian philosophers and scientists names, trying to separate the facts from the fiction. Even when it starts touching on the unbelievable, it’s written in such a sure and measured way you can let yourself sink into it and simply enjoy the ride. Slopen himself is an interesting character – starting off as something of a smug and isolated man, by the end we are seeing him from a different perspective and understanding those foibles that made him what he is.
Like many novels I have enjoyed recently, Strange Bodies deals with the power of language and identity. How much of who we are is contained within the way we write? Could a person be wholly recreated by analysing his life’s work and diaries, and how much goes unsaid between the phrases we put to paper? It’s an intriguing read dressed up in the clothes of a literary memoir and wearing the mask of a cryptothriller.