This novel is bookended with another common trope in recent fiction: a confused old woman with dementia remembering things incorrectly. OR IS SHE? From there, we move for a few chapters into her conventional life in WWII England, including the death of relatives in the war, the unexpected kindness of strangers, the frustration of hypocritical sexism and homophobia, and so on. Everything seems more or less typical and familiar, though the story is interesting enough to hold my attention, assisted by unobtrusive prose.
Then, suddenly, there’s a sharp left turn and the narrative bifurcates into two alternative histories of the same woman’s life. In one, she marries a selfish jerk who wants a conventional wife and isn’t interested in her happiness. In the other, she falls in love with a woman and lives basically a dream life, despite some tragic setbacks.
There have been a few of these alternative timeline books published as conventional fiction recently; I’m thinking in particular of Kate Atkinson’s Life After Life (soon to have a companion novel featuring the protagonist’s brother, to be released in a couple of weeks) and Jenny Erpenbeck’s The End of Days. What’s particularly odd about this one is that the historical details included in the background of each lifeline make it clear that neither of them is taking place in the history of our world. In one, the world descends into a right-wing nuclear pissing contest that ends in cancer clusters across South-East England; in the other, the world basically elevates itself into a socialist utopia (not completely, but there is marriage equality in the UK from the 1980s, for instance).
It’s difficult to know what to make of all this. I, of all people, have absolutely no problem with fantasy elements creeping into conventional fiction, however defensive and dickish Kazuo Ishiguro might get about it. In an ideal world, the beginning and end sections might have provided some clarity about what the author thought was going on. I wouldn’t even have minded if she’d left it open-ended. Instead, a couple of half-assed chapters attempt to punch the rising dough of the novel into a too-small tin. What it feels most like is a badly-managed high school English exam in which you spend all your time developing some complex and beautiful argument, only to look at the clock and realise you’ve left yourself two minutes to summarise the whole thing in the conclusion. This was particularly disappointing because both of the split timelines had interesting things to say about issues affecting women and gay issues, and the ways they might have been made different if society wasn’t what it is.