Every morning, Christine wakes up, goes to the bathroom, looks in the mirror and gets a terrible shock. The reflection she sees is that of a forty-seven year old woman, an older version of herself. But the last memory she has is from when she was twenty-two. A man she doesn’t recognize tells her, as he’s evidently done thousands of times before, that he’s her husband. Look, he has the photos to prove it.
I’m a total sucker for amnesia plots, something you’ll already know if you’ve read my short story, “The Bourne Indeterminacy”. Memory is so bound up with identity that it’s hard to resist asking what’s left of the latter when the former disappears. Usually, it’s revealed to the character who can’t remember, that he or she (Geena Davis as Charly Baltimore in The Long Kiss Goodnight) was probably a reprehensible human being, someone whose reappearance is good news to precisely nobody. What Christine finds out is very different: she was a loving mother and a successful novelist. For some reason, though, her husband doesn’t want her to remember these things.
Christine, we discover, was not a bad person, though she has a lapse or two. But if she is more sinned against, who’s doing the sinning — and how is she going to find out if she can’t remember anything about her life from one day to the next?
I felt that this book was both highly promising and more than a little disappointing. Some aspects of the story are handled very well indeed (I’m thinking about the way she has to reconstruct her memory artificially using a diary, with more and more each day to learn about her past), so I feel a little mean giving it just three stars but it would be overgenerous to give it four.
[Here is my review of Watson’s Second Life.]
Originally posted on Goodreads, 01-Jan-2016.