In a nation traumatised by a series of terrorist attacks on primary schools, people just can’t cope. So an experiment is going on in Newark-by-the-Sea. When a crime is committed, both criminal and victim have their minds wiped of the incident, the goal being to lessen the criminality of the former and the fear of the latter.
Audrey Hayes is a processing officer, assisting people as they go through the Process. At the beginning of the book she is already troubled, recognising a girl who has been made to forget a serious sexual assault, and not for the first time. Audrey has been through the process herself, as a criminal.
She is now working secretly with the police to investigate sexual exploitation, but she also becomes aware of planned terrorist attacks in Newark itself. Everyone seems to know more about her than she does, and she can’t be sure if the relationships people claim to have had with her are the relationships they actually had.
The idea of wiping away memories of crime as a general rule feels so patently terrible and open to exploitation that it’s hard to imagine it actually happening. How would it address any of the issues that led to the criminality? Wouldn’t it prevent the victim taking steps to protect herself from further crime?
Science fiction writers can set up these things just for the pleasure of knocking them down. But while the hypothetical may be unlikely, that’s not always the point. How would we, being who we are, respond to it? The book’s view of how men would treat women and girls in that scenario is hard to contradict.
It’s a short book that demands the reader’s full attention – my forgetting that “the ankles” was a place name made some sentences quite confusing. The first person narrator doesn’t always make it easy, sometimes holding crucial information back from the reader for several pages.
A cover quote compares it to Philip K. Dick, and in its length, seriousness, concept and style, it does feel like a book from an earlier era. It’s all the better for it. This is a grown-up, fiercely feminist sf novel, a worthy companion to other recent works set in the UK like If Then and Zero Bomb. Stephen Theaker ****
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