amnesia – Only Mostly Dead

RED Book 14: The Man Who Forgot His Wife – John O’Farrell

I confess I was slightly naughty here. I wasn’t supposed to buy any new books in March was I? However the book I was supposed to receive this month that was pre-ordered last year[*] won’t now arrive until April so I put this in as a substitute. Plus I’d just heard it reviewed and it sounded like the kind of thing I’d enjoy. Sometimes you just have to break the rules.

The Man Who Forgot His Wife concerns Vaughan who suffers a sudden attack of amnesia where he forgets pretty much everyone in his life. He forgets what he did for a living, his friends, his family and as the title suggests of course, his wife. So he has to start to re-build his life and these relationships. The only problem is that he’s in the middle of divorcing his wife and he no longer knows why.

I definitely enjoyed this book and read it in a couple of days. I’d say there were only a couple of laugh out loud moments but I was smiling most of the way through. O’Farrell writes warmly and sympathetically about marriage and family life, and particularly the way in which it’s not always a bed of roses. It’s not quite at Nick Hornby levels for me, who is my gold standard for these kind of topics, but it is very readable and fun.

7/10 – occasionally profound, often funny and always warm-hearted.

[*]I’m aware I keep talking about this without saying what it is. That’s deliberate.

6000 Pages 2011, Before I Go To Sleep – SJ Watson (pages 4037-4401)

Before I Go To Sleep is an easy book to write about for two reasons – it’s got an easy to understand concept and I really enjoyed it.

This book is told from the perspective of Christine who, when she wakes up in the morning is in unfamiliar surroundings. This happens every morning because Christine has a condition where she doesn’t form new memories, so each new day is a kind of reset. So she wakes up every day, not knowing who the middle-aged man in bed with her is. In fact she doesn’t really recognise the woman she sees in the mirror as she remembers herself to be much younger than she actually is. Slowly, patiently the man explains that he’s her husband and he gently reminds her about some of the other facts of her life. Something he must have to do every day.

The reason this book works so well is that the early chapters work simply as an experience of what it must be like to have this kind of memory condition. If you’ve seen the movie Memento then you’ll have some idea already but this is a slightly different take on the idea. The fact that our hero is female and the setting domestic gives it a different feel. Gradually, we as the reader begin to build up a picture of Christine’s life and also some of what has happened to her. This starts to raise questions which we become aware of before she does and the remainder of the book is almost a thriller, certainly we want to know what has happened and how it will play out if and when Christine starts to discover the truth.

So in the second half of the book you lose some of the psychological subtlety of the first part but you gain a page-turning what-will-happen-next plot. It really works, I found it gripping.

9/10 – both an insight into a different kind of life and a thrilling ride.