Drawing a blank
Liz Anderson
THE STORY OF FORGETTING by Stefan Merrill Block Faber, £14.99, pp. 313, ISBN 9780571237463 Ican’t remember. How many times have we all made a similar response and thought no more about it? But what if those three words start to recur rather more often? Panic. And what if you are under 60 years of age and you know that a family member has already been diagnosed with early-onset Alzheimer’s (EOA)? Total panic.
The Story of Forgetting is surprisingly upbeat considering that dementia — and the early-onset type, too — is at the heart of the story. The disease, its author Stefan Merrill Block has written, has spared few in his own mother’s family and as a consequence this extraordinarily accomplished first novel has an unsentimental authority — the descriptions of not only the symptoms of the disease but also its effect on other family members ring disturbingly true.
Abel Haggard, a 70-year-old hunchback, lives alone on his family’s ramshackle farm on the outskirts of a rapidly encroaching city, left with aching memories of his adored sister-in-law, with whom he fathered a much loved daughter, whom he longs to see again. Seth Waller, a clever 15-year-old student, lives with his parents hundreds of miles away, worrying about the increasingly bizarre behaviour of his mother and the incomprehensible lack of concern shown by his father. Abel and Seth narrate alternate chapters, and at first the only link between them appears to be that, in childhood, they were both told stories of a magical land — Isidora — where
Once a man arrives ... he will not remember the value of gold. He will not remember the value of anything, for that matter. From the empty streets of its ancient, golden capital spreads the land of Isidora, a land without memory, where every need is met and every sadness is forgotten.
Ah, a land without memory — there’s the clue. Seth’s parents, as their son relates, never wanted to think about what was behind them — their motto: ‘It’s better to try to never think about certain things.’ But, of course, Seth is forced to think about ‘certain things’ when his mother is diagnosed with EOA. He discovers that all those with the same variant as his mother share a common genetic origin, which makes all sufferers ‘at most the 12th or 13th cousin of any other’. It is at this point that the novel spins off into complete fantasy, describing the originator of this genetic mutation, the 18th-century Duke of Iddylwahl, who had 60 children (of whom 38 carried the disease), and without whom there would be no story, no link between Abel and Seth.
This potentially deeply depressing book about two Alzheimer’s-afflicted families is saved by Block’s beguiling imagination, as the narrative cleverly switches between the two main characters, whose search for past and present truths is the key to their interlocking lives. Credibility, however, is stretched to the limit in the closing pages — the end is just a bit too neat. And I don’t believe that dementia sufferers ever reach a ‘place [that was] thoughtless and perfect. A place freed from the past and from the future. A place where nothing was remembered and so nothing could be lost.’ If only it were that simple, but this is fiction after all.
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