The Sudden Appearance of Hope

WHAT A BOOK. The writing of Claire North is next level. It's dense, taut, meticulously researched, and makes a strong statement about the state of the world today.

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The choices the author makes, as far as the way the story is presented, only make sense on the very last page, so the story holds mystery and interest until the very last words.

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The author writes in a way that brings to mind a jazz musician soloing or a great chef working: she has tremendous range of thought and there is awe in witnessing it because of the virtuosic mastery on display. This chick can write.

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Her cheeks are contoured bone and silky rivers of skin, her eyebrows waggle against great parallels of thought on her forehead, her mouth is encased in smile lines and pout lines and scowl lines and worry lines and laughter lines and there is no part of her which is not in some way written over with stories.

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There are two solid storylines that meet up pretty quickly. The top layer, which could have been a book on its own, is about a woman who is utterly forgettable - literally. As soon as she walks away, the person she was interacting with forgets she exists.

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Imagine trying to have a relationship, a doctor’s visit, rent an apartment, or do anything at all when people are shocked to find you in their house after they’ve made a quick trip to the restroom.

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As a young teen, her parents threw her stuff away and converted her room to an office. She nearly starves to death while in hospital because nobody remembers to bring her food. Life, for her, is lived only in the ever-present Now. A fantastic premise!

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The second layer is about an app that is designed to make everyone homogenous, the same, perfect. As you might guess, it becomes extremely popular. The lead character wants both to destroy the app and use it herself to become memorable. Mystery, intrigue, and violence ensue.

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Remembrance is an act of looking back, and we do not exist in the past, except here, in these letters and photos. Even reading these is not an act of remembrance, because I write now. I hold your image now. I re-read these words, now. I look at you, now. I close my eyes, now. I exist only now.

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Only my thoughts, the thoughts that I have in this present moment, they are the prism through which all else travels, and even the past, even memory, is remembered only now. We exist in the present tense, and even our futures will one day be the past, and the past will be forgotten, and so only now remains. What matters, therefore, is not hope for things to come, nor regret for things passed, but this action in this moment, these deeds, this now.

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There are several techniques that the author uses to make the story very engaging. It’s told in the first person, she uses sentence breaks and punctuation to great effect, there is an arc specifically for the lead character’s internal dialog, the letters left to self and others, the lead character’s imaginings of her biological mother in which her mother speaks to her, the counting and defining of things. These things gather weight and meaning as the story progresses.

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My only tiny critique of this writer (that I also felt about the other book of hers that I read) is that the character definition is left overly vague.

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One of the major characters in the book is describe thusly: “She was old”.

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What? I get that, in some cases, it’s a good idea to let the reader fill in the image, but sheesh, I was quite a ways into this book before I understood the lead character is black! I would have liked to have had that image in my head from the beginning. But that is a minor criticism that doesn’t affect my fawning admiration for this author.