I approached the novel with high expectations – it was being promoted at Blackwell’s, and its cover is crammed with good reviews, not least ‘writing that takes your breath away’, courtesy of the Sunday Express. At the risk of sounding simply contrary, I found almost nothing to enjoy in a novel that’s only defence against misery was opacity.
It’s hard to describe the plot, such as it is, without revealing what might be called spoilers; the first hundred or so pages leave us in post-apocalyptic London in the unhelpful hands of a narrator who has not only lost her long-term memory, but also does not seem aware of what is happening in the ‘present’. Such mystery is presumably intended to draw us in, but instead gives us no credible character to sympathise or engage with, and the clichéd landscape of a broken city (filled, to no discernable purpose, with a litany of named chain shops) is incapable of filling this gap.
