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The historian and novelist Fiona Mozley acknowledged in a 2018 piece for the Guardian that the city of York had a major influence on both her careers. Childhood and adolescence in a place such as York, full of time and times, can generate conflict between “the desire to live in the past and the need to extract oneself from it”. Awake Awake, a follow-up to her previous novels, 2017’s Booker-shortlisted Elmet and 2021’s Hot Stew, engages with two types of memory: the personal and the historical. They’re not exactly at odds, but as far as living in the past is concerned they feed on one another in a complex, entangled relationship.
Narrator Mary Mooney – also a novelist, also from York, and whose first book is also shortlisted for a major prize – tells the story of her mental illness. Or she seems to. She begins in childhood. We’re introduced to her parents and her parents’ friends, religious academics in York; to her home in Cathedral Close; to school and her school friends, with whom she will stay in contact as she grows up. Life is a round of family occasions, church events and church politics, spiced with adventure and wild excitement in the countryside, mischief in the classroom. Detail is piled on detail and presented with photographic clarity, from her father, with his “large, pointed nose and grey eyes that looked greener than usual when he was outside in the vegetable patch”, to the fall of the Twin Towers, which she recalls seeing “on a television in the school staff room … looking through the door from the outside and glimpsing it on the tiny screen”.
But though they’re startlingly persistent, it will turn out that some of her later memories – especially those associated with her literary success – are false. Some of the people she remembers are – or so she’s been convinced by friends and family, doctor and therapist – unreal. She has never met any of them. They’re “wraiths”, she is forced to conclude, “who came to me with news. Recollections of their own fabulous tales.” Hitchcockian uncertainty pervades and drives the narrative from the moment we understand this.
Mary admits that she is the most unreliable of narrators. She’s determined to be honest and hastens to make her own confusion clear. She’s on anti-psychotic medication. At the same time, we sense in her narrative the artfulness of the novelist. She’s holding back, especially when it comes to the one detail we really want to know: who were the mysterious men she believes she met at a literary dinner? What were they trying to tell her about her Nobel prize-winning Jewish grandfather and his obscure but pivotal role in ending the second world war? What’s real and what is not? What’s the difference between telling stories and “telling stories”?
Soon our own memories begin to seem unreliable. Has this or that minor character appeared in the book before, without our noticing? Or are they a kind of unsignalled prolepsis, a flicker of the future? Perhaps simply the product of Mary’s illness, the disarray of the time stream following a psychotic break?
There are, of course, two novelists at work here, and the artfulness won’t let up until the end. Even then, while Mozley displays for us the sketch of a conclusion, assurances are not offered. Her teasing, consciously unstable play of fictional autobiography against fictitious autofiction flips between everyday language and the flattened delivery used to describe the aggressively misogynist and racist denizens of the “false” memories. If we didn’t so clearly recognise the settings against which the latter events take place, we’d think of them as pure Lynchian invention.
“We dwell deep within our memories,” Mozley has Mary conclude. “They are in us and we are within them.” Even now, remembering her younger self as she watched the fall of the towers – an event mythologised even as it was happening – she’s “no longer clear whether this memory relates to reality or has been constructed”. History and memory converge. Similar processes work on both. In the age of conspiracy theory and made-up news, fiction is never far behind. This understanding constantly undermines her attempts to build a “teleology” of the more corrosive events of her existence.
Her father, meanwhile, having fallen out with the dean of the minster after a superficial disagreement about a memorial service, has his own moment of awakening and leaves the church for a commitment to gnosticism. In a moment, the material world has slipped away from him; he’s had a glimpse beneath what Mary describes as “the thin film of perception we call reality”. Whoever we are, whatever our memories, this seems to be the best we can expect.
Awake Awake is, on the one hand, a clarion call – a clear-eyed view of contemporary moral and political failure in the UK – and on the other, an assembly of engrossing philosophical and metaphysical engagements with the nature of memory. Its barely resolved uncertainties make it a fascinating read, but in the end you aren’t sure it was meant to be quite so strange.
English (US) ·