This novel was longlisted for the Man Booker Prize and praised by one of my favorite authors, Geraldine Brooks. It is a piece of dystopian fiction imagining an England where music is used to control a population that can no longer read and where memories have disappeared. All anyone needs to know is imparted through the carillon chimes each day. While the conceit is exceedingly clever, and the story often engaging, I found myself ultimately disappointed. This is a case where the reader can’t see the forest for the trees. Smaill employs imaginative details, usually related to music, in creating specific scenes, but she falls short when it comes to creating a coherent “big picture” for the reader. The world that Smaill is trying to create is vague enough that it was sometimes hard to follow the action and difficult to feel the tension and fear that I believe she was trying to create. This is, after all, a story about trying to save the world and risking one’s own life to do so. I was curious to see how it would end, but not on the edge of my seat, and not terribly surprised at the resolution.
The gist of the novel is as follows: at some point in the past, an event called “Allbreaking” destroyed the world, or at least all the buildings and infrastructure. A shadowy organization called The Order came forth to restore harmony, emphasizing the good of the collective over individualism, and using the daily chimes as a form of mind control. What most people don’t remember is that there used to be a guild, the Ravensguild, that remembered the before-times, and The Order found that dangerous. While members of the Ravensguild tried to preserve memories and pass them down, the Order strove to wipe out its members.
So fast forward a generation or two, and we meet our narrator Simon, a teenager who is leaving the countryside for London. This is where Smaill begins the story. Simon has a bag of memories, or rather, a bag of items that, when he touches them, take him back into a specific memory. Without these things, he cannot remember his own past, his recently deceased parents, or even what it is he is going to London to do. He knows he’s supposed to meet somebody, but he can’t remember why. In the meantime, he becomes involved with a gang that scavenges along the Thames and is run by a blind guy named Lucien. Lucien seems to have some mysterious powers, some ability to remember that the other members lack, but he also senses that Simon has some important power too. Simon and Lucien are gonna figure stuff out and try to save the world. And a love story is thrown in for good measure.
OK, so what’s good? Well, the idea of lost memory and power in music is clever. Lucien gives directions to his gang through music as opposed to verbal description. Communication is music, music is communication in this weird future world. But this wears thin after a while. Smaill often uses musical terms, for example “lento” and “subito” instead of “slowly” and “suddenly,” which again is clever but I would have appreciated a little musical glossary at the start of the novel. We didn’t all study music. I also like the incorporation of ideas like “body memory” and “object memory” in the story, and the community of “memorylost,” who seem almost zombie-like, so untethered from life have they become. Unfortunately, Smaill doesn’t do much to develop the memorylost storyline.
My one big overall gripe is, as mentioned above, the lack of a big picture, a grand explanation of the who and the why behind this world that Smaill imagines. OK, the Order wants to control everyone through music. Why? There’s no backstory on this organization, who they are, who supports them, why anyone would have joined them way back when. And the same goes for Ravensguild. As a result, I can’t appreciate the tension that is supposed to exist between the two groups; as a reader, I’m just supposed to accept it. We know there are “poliss” (police) and members of the Order roaming the streets. Why? I can’t figure out what they are looking for. Is there crime in this world? Are they concerned about rebellion? There’s no sense of urgency or desperation in this narrative. And it seems to me that Smaill often lets her characters off the hook. At critical points in the plot, when Simon needs something, it just sort of happens for him. The last part of the book should have been a thrilling, can’t-put-this-down-unti-I-finish joy-read. For me, it wasn’t. It was rather anti-climactic.
I think there was great potential to turn this story into a blockbuster. I wish the writer had spent some time really creating that past world that was lost, warts and all, so that we could understand the origins of the Order and of Ravensguild. Even though I liked having as narrator someone whose memory is compromised, it would have helped to also have some third person narration in there, too, to fill in those gaps. Overall ok but not a great read.