The Booker-shortlisted author Fiona Mozley follows Elmet and Hot Stew with an ambitious tale of failing mental health from an unreliable narrator who dips in and out of “total alienation.” Protagonist Mary believes she is “at the centre of an intricate, conspiratorial web” and that her memory is the problem. She has “become lost somewhere” and is “two people now” as her friends “work together to pull (her) back into the real world”.
Uniquely, this is not a story of memory loss, “it was not a sickness of forgetting” but rather of having an abundance of remembrances. Scenes crowd Mary’s mind “like du Maurier’s birds” so she cannot be sure which are real and which are imagined.
In looking for clues as to what led to her psychosis, Mary recounts the experiences that shaped her to therapist Sita, and it is in these scenes of a vividly depicted York, on school trips, and at parties with friends, that the novel comes most alive. The early 2000s are beautifully depicted and soundtracked by bands of the day. Mary’s struggle to discern fact from fiction is eased somewhat by connecting with the people who knew her in her youth. It is through her childhood friends, Eric and Amelia, that she gets a glimpse of herself and some clarity, though not much.
“There is no real and unreal. Only memory. All of it together,” she says. The pervasive ambiguity Mary feels is experienced by the reader, too. When we believe we know something with certainty, such as that Mary has a mental illness, we are told even that may not be accurate. “There was never any certainty, so perhaps there was never truly psychosis.”
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This refrain of doubt, which permeates the novel, is taxing. Caveating interactions with statements such as, “I am not clear whether this memory relates to reality or has been constructed” make for an, at times, destabilising read.
Mozley has written an introspective and intelligent novel in a non-linear fashion. It considers the impact of friendships formed in childhood and of the events in history that we both witness and study. It also poses, but does not answer the question: If one cannot trust one’s memory, who and what can be trusted?
- Catherine Higgins-Moore is a PhD candidate at Queen’s University Belfast’s Seamus Heaney Centre.
