This is the oddest book I’ve read in a long time. The protagonist who seems to be an agent of some kind, deep in spy hibernation, is activated by a call. He is very well prepared with a fluid identity. Memory, which is a benchmark that we triangulate of our sense of self with, changes its shape and location.
When I joined they didn’t have to tell me that for security reasons my memories of the actual mechanics of those early contacts must be suppressed. And this didn’t mean buried where they might be dug up, but set into competition with other memories, a competition which because of their superficial improbability they would lose. I found it fairly easy.
I was able to invent incidents in my past and elaborate them and after a few weeks become genuinely unsure whether or not I was remembering what had happened or what I had thought about so carefully that I now believed. And even when something seemed to obtrude as a real memory, by remembering it and rethinking it I could make it not more but less real because any real memory there might have been was obscured by the process of remembering it.
The note telling him to stand by has been typed on his own typewriter which is kept in a locked up office in the attic that he alone has the key to. How can that be? Is this a Kalfkaesque fantasy set in suburban England? And are the jovial neighbours what they seem to be? He has to keep an eye on them. Their games of golf could be a cover for sharing intelligence out of the range of electronic listening devices.
I have no idea of how this may end even 70% in. My ereader tells me this sort of thing but I keep it offline so that what I read may not disappear into a publisher’s algo or track me in any way. You can’t be too careful.
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