Fiction Reviews
Dissolution
(2025) Nicholas Binge, Harper Voyager, £16.99, hrdbk, 372 pp. ISBN 978-0-008-66882-2
Sometimes no explanation at all is better than one that makes little or no sense and that’s certainly true when it comes to this book. Ostensibly about memory and loss and our sense of time passing, it offers a mix of science-fiction, horror and fantasy that doesn’t quite gel, especially when it comes to that last component. The story begins with an interview – or is it an interrogation? – structured quite formally in which the interlocutor, named ‘Hassan’, is asking questions, printed in bold, of Margaret (Maggie) Webb about her husband, Stanley, who is confined to what is apparently a care-facility, having suffered some form of extreme memory loss. Dementia, whether through Alzheimer’s or otherwise, is now a common motif in literature but by the end of this opening chapter it becomes clear that there is something else going on here, something even more disturbing, as Maggie is asked by Hassan about a visit he himself made to her home. She recalls that during that visit, Hassan told her a story about a young man who took part in a research study and suddenly could no longer remember his friends or family. And, Hassan told her, the organization behind that study owns the facility where Stanley now resides and from which, Maggie recalls being urged, she must free him.
At this point the story is shaping up to be a familiar one about some secret but powerful group that is erasing people’s memories for some nefarious reason. But it is actually weirder than that.
Both the structure and the tone of the narrative then shift, as Stanley’s early life is portrayed. At boarding school he is rescued from the shadows by a kindly if eccentric teacher who includes him in an after-school study group where he makes two life-long friends in Jacques and Raphael. Again, this might seem familiar territory but for two things. First, the focus of their little study group is, significantly, memory and how to improve it. Secondly, certain odd things happen, in themselves apparently innocuous, which might initially be overlooked by the reader but which are subsequently revealed to be crucial to the narrative.
These initial chapters then set up the structure for the book as a whole, with the conventional retelling of Stanley’s schooldays and eventual career interleaved between the on-going interview with Maggie, with each iteration of the latter headed by an ominous countdown of so many hours, minutes and seconds until ‘dissolution’. Although this makes for a somewhat jarring combination when it comes to readability, it certainly enhances the sense that deep secrets are slowly, if only partially, being uncovered to reveal something both profound and, ultimately, horrific about the role that memory plays when it comes to our sense of the passage of time.
However, this is where the ‘explanation’, that is really no such thing, comes in. I won’t reveal any spoilers but suffice to say it includes a dash of quantum ‘woo’ with a good helping of some form of time travel. Again, both are all too familiar, and if that were all, the fact they don’t really work together, at least not as presented here, would not distract from what is at heart a compellingly strange story. But what spoils the mix, unfortunately, is the inclusion of a ritual, appropriated after Stanley goes on a kind of ‘walkabout’ in the Australian desert, and which involves not just the obligatory runic symbols and fire but also, curiously, lavender. How this is able to keep the story’s Big Bad at bay is left unclear, beyond some vague gestures at the Aboriginal idea of the ‘Dreaming’ before time.
Resisting the temptation to draw on such ideas from around the world (the Ancient Greek notion of ‘apeiron’ and the neo-Confucion idea of ‘wuji’ are also thrown into the mix), may have resulted in a less inclusive narrative, undoubtedly, but also one that would have been tighter, better balanced, and also, I believe, even more disturbing.
Steven French
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