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molluskey 's review for:
The Sudden Appearance of Hope
by Claire North
At its best, [a: Claire North|7210024|Claire North|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1440105009p2/7210024.jpg]’s writing hits you like a snowball to the face. It can be raw and powerful, offering precise, and sometimes brutally clear, insights into individual experience. At its worst, it’s more like an avalanche; still beautiful, still mesmerising, but somehow heavy-handed, excessive, tiresome. [b: The Sudden Appearance of Hope|25746699|The Sudden Appearance of Hope|Claire North|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1454363620s/25746699.jpg|45587878] was not, in my appearance, North at her best. I finished feeling lukewarm, and while there were moments of pure song, that I read over and over again, as a whole I found it disappointing.
It’s an incredibly interesting concept for a book, and sits quite happily in line with her previous works, The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August and Touch, and, as in those works, she takes her time exploring it, considering it from every angle: how it could benefit a person, how it could harm them, how the act of being forgotten is a kind of little death, that repeats over and over again. If the book focused only on that, I would have loved it.
It’s the other plotline that bothered me. When a woman she considers her friend (as far as anyone who is entirely forgettable can have friends) dies, Hope comes into conflict with the new app Perfection, which promises to revamp the user’s life by offering them rewards for being, well, perfect. I’ve seen other reviewers call this a meditation on contemporary life, on our addiction to our phones, and in this sense it ties well into Hope’s condition, into a world where being recognised online has become an act of saying, ‘Here I am. This is me. I am alive’, and where being ignored in such circumstances can leave one feeling as if they are disappearing, fading away.
That said, I had a quick look and it seems like most reviewers disagreed with me. But then, I didn’t massively love The Sense of an Ending either, and that won the Man Booker prize. Maybe I’m just not cut out for literary fiction.
Read this book if you like: espionage, literary fiction, a great concept, and a tight first person narrative. Don’t read if you want: a light read, variety, a book that lives up to the other, brilliant novels she has written.
There is a girl you do not remember[b: The Sudden Appearance of Hope|25746699|The Sudden Appearance of Hope|Claire North|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1454363620s/25746699.jpg|45587878] is the story of Hope Arden, who has the peculiar condition of being entirely forgettable. In comes on her gradually, in stages, but by the time she’s sixteen, she has been forgotten by everyone she knew, including her parents. She can meet people, get to know them, listen to their entire life story, but as soon as she’s left their eyesight, they can no longer remember her. Which makes her both miserable, and an excellent thief.
It’s an incredibly interesting concept for a book, and sits quite happily in line with her previous works, The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August and Touch, and, as in those works, she takes her time exploring it, considering it from every angle: how it could benefit a person, how it could harm them, how the act of being forgotten is a kind of little death, that repeats over and over again. If the book focused only on that, I would have loved it.
It’s the other plotline that bothered me. When a woman she considers her friend (as far as anyone who is entirely forgettable can have friends) dies, Hope comes into conflict with the new app Perfection, which promises to revamp the user’s life by offering them rewards for being, well, perfect. I’ve seen other reviewers call this a meditation on contemporary life, on our addiction to our phones, and in this sense it ties well into Hope’s condition, into a world where being recognised online has become an act of saying, ‘Here I am. This is me. I am alive’, and where being ignored in such circumstances can leave one feeling as if they are disappearing, fading away.
Alone, you can lose yourself, or you may find yourself, and most of the time you do both.And it is interesting. But it’s also dogmatic. The same themes repeat over and over again. Hope’s frustration with being forgotten (understandable, yes; interesting after the seventh time? No), her distaste for this kind of world, the “evil” of the people who created this app, the terrifying world they’ve created. There isn’t a break. It just keeps going and going and, after a while, I found that the power of it started to pale. I get it. You’re upset. Maybe I just wasn’t reading it in the right frame of mind, but it never grabbed me in the same way her previous work did. It felt, and I hate to say it, as if North had become a little too enamoured of her literary power, of her words, and was wielding them like a hatchet instead of a brush.
That said, I had a quick look and it seems like most reviewers disagreed with me. But then, I didn’t massively love The Sense of an Ending either, and that won the Man Booker prize. Maybe I’m just not cut out for literary fiction.
I exist in this physical world as sure as stone, but in the world of men—in that world that is collective memory, in the dream-world where people find meaning, feeling, importance—I am a ghost. Only in the present tense am I real.To try and end this review on a more positive note, the writing is still beautiful. Even when she’s not at her best, North can craft some damn good prose. Hope’s character, too, is complex and well-articulated and her struggle to be remembered is pressing, tortured and intricately rendered (most of the time).
Read this book if you like: espionage, literary fiction, a great concept, and a tight first person narrative. Don’t read if you want: a light read, variety, a book that lives up to the other, brilliant novels she has written.