
Jane turns her phone on after a flight to learn that her husband Jim, hale and healthy a few hours ago, has died. When she arrives at the hospital where they both work, she finds his body is there only from the neck down: his head has been removed by a strange organisation, Polaris, and placed in cryogenic storage at Jim’s request. From there, the narrative bifurcates, alternating chapters between Jane’s grief and fight against Polaris, and Jim’s reawakening sometime in the distant future.
This is a weird little novel (only around 200 pages) that has, at its heart, the relationship between a husband and wife who love each other but also hurt each other. I’m all for weird love stories, and I was prepared to like this one, but ultimately the sci fi elements felt too trippy, the rules of Jim’s new world far too arbitrary. And I’m certainly in favour of non-linear narrative structures, but I’m not sure this one was successful: the denouement, such as it was (and it was subtle), came too soon, when there was too much of the book still to go; that, too, felt arbitrary to me.
There are some well-sketched secondary characters in here. I particularly liked Jane’s senile aunt, shown later in the book, heartbreakingly, as the insightful and funny woman she used to be. The two protagonists are fine, too, though the authors make some choices with Jane in particular that I’m not sure about. What I mean is that there are some good things about this book, and I think it has some things to say about marriage that are worth saying, and that it’s trying to say them in an original way. But ultimately, I don’t think it manages to do those things very well.