Melissa has cut all ties with her father Marcus Prenderghast, a brilliant doctor who seems to have been to neuroscience what Oppenheimer was to chemistry: a genius who triggered a technological revolution that turned out to be, in the long run, a nightmare for humanity – as scientist Millie, one of the two female narrators of M for Amnesia, puts it bluntly: “Once a discovery’s been made, it can’t be unmade.”
In a world where bodily optimisation is first achieved through the automatised reproduction of organs, then through digital enhancements and health laws, scientists have realised human suffering is mainly a matter of the mind – merely replacing a diseased liver won’t nip the problem in the bud, since the alcoholic will destroy organ after organ as long as nobody helps him recover from his addiction.
Hoping to put an end to mental illness, Marcus Prenderghast cofounds the prestigious Memory Research Center, where scientists work on overwriting traumatic memories with fragments of made-up past lives. As ever so often with fictional scientists, Prenderghast will soon turn dark. After initially following in the footsteps of her cherished dad, Melissa sees her idealised view of heroic Marcus crumble when she starts taking care of Millie, a former scientist saved from a fire who has lost all memory and struggles to reconstruct her past. Disappointed by her manipulative father whom she suspects has lied to her about almost everything, including Millie’s past and the treatment he’s been giving her, Melissa has turned her back on a civilisation that struggles to challenge climate change, pandemics, and political uproar.
Despite her retreat from a digital autocracy where capitalism and eugenics have taken over and where the poor, merely called “creatures”, have lost all right to citizenship, news about her father’s death reaches her in the very first sentence of Anne-Marie Reuter’s ambitious first novel M for Amnesia. This is thanks to her best friend Styx, a cyborg-artist whose antenna keeps him connected to the so-called civilised world even when Melissa and him retreat to a commune installed in one of the few niches of microclimate where lakes and forest have survived.
It’s her father’s unsettling cremation ceremony that triggers Melissa’s investigation into her father’s enigmatic death – in a world where health is strictly monitored, her father succumbing to a heart attack appears suspicious –, leading her to recall those treacherously peaceful days taking care of Millie in the scientist’s suburban home.
Combining Philip K. Dick’s mind-bending science-fiction universes and Christopher Nolan’s reflections on planting ideas and false memories in people’s minds (think Inception and Memento) with the deeply humane tone of Kazuo Ishiguro’s more recent melancholic sci-fi novels – Reuter borrows the nurse-patient-in-a-dystopian-setting-constellation from Never Let Me Go, the challenge of telling a story through the lens of a character whose narrative skills are impaired by technology from Klara and the Sun, the story of memory loss and the dangers of recovering from amnesia from The Buried Giant – Anne-Marie Reuter’s M for Amnesia is an utterly complex fiction whose multilayered, chronologically non-linear narrative strands are masterfully woven into a densely orchestrated novel about memory loss, trauma and our pathological craving for perfection and improvement.
At the core of its deceitful and labyrinthine layers lies a touching story about death, loss, and our inability to let go. In a beautiful scene, Melissa and Millie browse through the elderly scientist’s wardrobe, only to be confronted with yet another cognitive void: “All those dresses, trousers, blouses, skirts had their story to tell, the events of a life they had taken part in. A life I knew about but could only guess at. A life Millie had forgotten. The clothes knew more about the past than she did with her woolly memory.” And yet the common frustration of being unable to find out about Millie’s past will be overcome by the friendship connecting the two women.
Going back and forth between Melissa’s past life at Millie’s house and her present life in the commune, switching between the two homodiegetic narrators’ equally unreliable worldviews and, inside Millie’s narrative, between implanted, real and indeterminate recollections1, M for Amnesia suffers at times from its convoluted story. There’s a plot twist revealed in the past that, for reasons of readerly suspense, seems to implausibly not affect Melissa’s present. There are moments where the narrative loops almost seem to spin out of control and where the reader’s attempts at meticulous reconstructon of what’s going on in the chaotic worlds of the novel are ruined or blocked by Millie’s and Melissa’s incoherent minds, leaving you not only wondering who can be trusted – but also whether anyone can be at all.
In the course of this sometimes voluntarily frustrating narrative that can only be read in a mood of generalised suspicion, Reuter admirably constructs a fictional world that shows the ontological consequences of toying with human memory – an inherently unreliable cognitive mechanism as such. Yet, as Reuter sometimes sensibly portrays, it is the only means we have for recalling our lives, the heart of all narrative and (auto-)biographical reconstruction of who we have been and how we want people to perceive us.
In our real world populated with (yet) unenhanced human beings, an unreliable narrator can be exposed through epistemic proof: if I pretend not to have been on a drunken night out with my publisher, a quick text message to any Gudde Wëllen waiter will quickly establish the truth I’d tried to hide. That’s what you call cross-referencing – the very basic of epistemology, without which truth can’t be recovered. In Reuter’s world of memory implants, a world whose ontological consistency and rules the reader can only guess through the intrinsically unreliable narrative fragments of its narrators, the cross-referencing of Millie’s and Melissa’s versions only leads us to realise they’re both biased, re- and overwritten like palimpsests, plunging us into an era of generalised paranoia and ontological plurality where reality becomes a malleable product sold to those who can afford to pay for their version to become the dominant narrative.
The reader of M for Amnesia therefore needs to be very careful in order not to miss different glitches in Millie’s and Melissa’s narratives, the moments where its metaphorical bees buzz too loudly, where you get the eerie and creepy sense that secondary characters are reprogramming the very lines you’re reading. If it is a challenging task at times, and if the hints are at moments a tad obvious, the novel rewards you with a cleverly constructed and breathtakingly plausible fiction about a nightmarish world to come.