Neil Jordan’s first novel was titled The Past. One wonders if there was ever a temptation for him to title this, his latest, The Future, set as it is in the year 2084.
It follows Christian Cartwright, a quietly rebellious librarian (is there any other kind?) working for a mysterious institute in a mansion “at the wet end of a forgotten peninsula” (Beara, in case you were wondering). Christian’s stacks are filled with literal bad memories stored on “fragile silicon disks”, yet it is his own recollections – the death of his lover – which torment him. Indeed, at the core of the novel lies Christian’s dubious choice to create a digital copy of the departed Isolde (“his own personal ghost”) from the various traces she has left while living.
Such a resurrection is something post-cyberpunk sci-fi has long flirted with, and is an idea with which Jordan is clearly conversant. This is no surprise given that he has been stalking the science-fictional mode for decades. From the postcolonial biology of The Dream of a Beast to the knotty uncertainties of Shade to the peculiar cosmology underpinning Carnivalesque, Jordan has long displayed curiosity with the form, secreting its mechanisms behind more traditional subject matter such as ghosts and fairy folk.
Here, however, the science fictional is uncloaked, and, as the novel progresses, Jordan revels in imagery of supercomputers and technologically enhanced clairvoyant dreamers which the genre has endlessly rehearsed in everything from Minority Report to the novels of Alastair Reynolds.
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The Library of Traumatic Memory is therefore not the work of a literary author merely holidaying in the speculative, as sometimes happens, but, by contrast, that of a writer who understands genre and has chosen an appropriate palette for a specific set of contemporary anxieties. For while Jordan’s typical curing waters and love triangles are all present, this is a novel which speaks to our current moment of data-harvesting taken to extremes and to the kind of dud seances which Big Tech proports to offer via its ghoulish “grief avatar business”. (The heartbroken Christian, to his credit, struggles at least a little with the ethics of his project.)
Nonetheless, Jordan can rarely resist the reliable allure of the Gothic, and so the novel also reaches back two centuries to one of Christian’s ancestors, the architect Montagu, who originally designed the mansion where his descendant’s digital drama plays out. At first feeling like a diversion, these Montagu sections in fact achieve a vitality which Jordan holds off on granting to Christian’s present day until the second half of the book neatly begins to work against the tropes and expectations it earlier established.
This is just one of the ways in which the two narratives inevitably reflect each other as Jordan seeks to make real a theme underpinning much of his previous fiction, that of history’s persistent influence on what follows. The linkages by which he does so are clever but never unbearably so, with lightly philosophical digressions on cause and effect, the malleability of memory, and the ambitions of capital to bend all of the above to its will.
It is the latter quality, lensed through the estrangement of science fiction, which permits Jordan to critique not just tech-bro culture (here mostly depicted in the mad-scientist vein), but also right-wing politics (in this future, effigies of Donald Trump “had been burnt for decades” even if no one can remember why, though the mushroom clouds mentioned early on suggest a clue) and, more pointedly, medical science’s reliance on exploiting disadvantaged bodies, in this case symbolised by an institute researcher’s fetishisation of sleeping Traveller girls. These criticisms are never didactic, but points are consistently made.
Thus an immediately engaging novel which lends itself to rereading, The Library of Traumatic Memory intriguingly displays traces of Jordan’s own inheritors, such as Mike McCormack (of the underrated Notes from a Coma), as well as international proponents of literary sci-fi, such as David Mitchell (whose own novels frequently culminate in a post-collapse west Cork seemingly just down the road from Jordan’s Beara).
It is a novel heavy with messages from the future and invisible colleges of alchemists concerned with “the departure of science from its magical roots”, but nonetheless its centre mostly holds. The result, like Christian and Montagu’s obsidian mirrors, frequently exhibits a kaleidoscopic quality through which the reader glimpses other facets of Jordan the writer and, for that matter, Jordan the film-maker, and while the narrative conclusion requires a certain suspension of disbelief – or, perhaps more accurately, an entanglement of belief – it all rallies with an affecting and effective denouement.
