Whoever that Hope Arden is who laughs with her friends, smiles with her family, flirts with her lover, resents her boss, triumphs with her colleagues – she ceased to exist, and it has been surprising for me to discover just how little of me is left behind, when all that is stripped away. [loc. 172]
Hope Arden is utterly unmemorable: that is, nobody she meets remembers her once they're not looking at her, interacting with her. It began in childhood, when her parents would forget to lay a place for her at the dinner table, and her friends would look at her and see a stranger. (Animals, and people with damaged brains, seem to be able to recognise her.)
Without any of the social context that makes us human, Hope lives in a perpetual present. Hers is an appallingly lonely life, but Hope, realising the difficulty of sheer existence as a perpetual stranger, has made a virtue of her condition. She's a thief and a con artist: a criminal who nobody can remember, who can't be matched to photographs or surveillance video ("I studied her picture, I know her face, you are not her, I would recognise her ..." [2696]), who will be forgotten as soon as she's out of sight. Whose guilt nobody knows, except Hope herself.
When a young, insecure woman commits suicide, driven to despair by the Perfection app ('the new life-enhancing, you-enhancing app from Prometheus', a way of spending and exercising and connecting that makes its more dedicated users truly memorable), Hope -- who is the antithesis of Perfection -- is appalled. She studies Perfection's origins, its app permissions (horribly close to Facebook Messenger!), the brother and sister who developed it, and the ways in which it changes and shapes personality. Because maybe, in Perfection, there's something that addresses Hope's condition.
Hope's situation is unique, and North explores the ramifications of being instantly forgettable: the habits (running, counting, learning) that Hope cultivates in order to fill the spaces where there should be work, or friends, or family; the impossibility of decent medical care; the way that any sexual relationship will be, at best, a series of one-night stands. (At worst, she's a rapist, if her partner forgets that they consented.) It's freedom, yes, but at the cost of any connection.
This philosophical examination spins out against a glamorous, globe-trotting thriller-plot that felt very cinematic. There are friends and foes, abuses of trust, cunning schemes, narrow escapes. There is the creeping homogenous vileness of Perfection, and the mysterious Byron's quest to destroy it. There are darknet transactions, a Möbius bracelet that I covet, a plethora of hotel rooms, and the poetry of Lord Byron.
I loved this novel, though it meanders and rambles, and some parts of it already feel dated (it was published in 2016). I loved its meanders and rambles: I liked Hope, and her situation felt uncomfortably relatable during lockdown, when so many social ties have withered and fallen away. There's that old adage that we live for as long as we're remembered: Hope, the character, lives on regardless.
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