This book is best described as a linked
series of six novellas, spaced about a decade apart, with a new first person
narrator each time.
1984: Troubled teenager Holly Sykes (treated
as a child for hearing ‘radio voices’ in her head) runs away from home in
Gravesend and encounters a mix of folk: some normal like Ed Brubeck, a boy from
school who gives her practical help and advice; some weird like Esther Little,
who seems to know her already and imparts an enigmatic message; and some
positively paranormal, though that encounter is immediately redacted from her
conscious memory. Her week of rebellion ends when a domestic crisis, little
brother Jacko going missing, calls her home.
1991: Hugo lamb, Cambridge undergraduate,
clever and he knows it, is in with the posh set, whose members he sees as fair
game for his exploitative schemes. While skiing with his rich chums in
Switzerland he learns that a scam back home has had unforeseen consequences
that make a return unwise, but his companions abroad are also in trouble
locally so he seeks refuge with a barmaid he has been targeting with limited
success – one Holly Sykes. Sparks fly as estuary girl with attitude meets posh boy
with class and charm, snowed-in together in her bedsit. But posh boy has also
met some strange characters with a bizarre but tempting future to sell. Which
way to go?
2004: It is Sharon Sykes wedding bash in
Brighton. Sharon is Holly’s younger sister but the narrator is Ed Brubeck, now
Holly’s partner and father to her daughter Aoife. Ed’s a war correspondent in
the Middle East and while he recounts the events of the wedding he also
reflects on his recent traumatic posting. Then a home based trauma occurs –
Aoife goes missing (an echo of Jacko’s disappearance) and it needs one of
Holly’s unconscious psychic utterances (a radio voice) to direct the search,
during which reference is made to something called The Script.
2015: Our next narrator, for a five year span,
is Crispin Hershey, author, living a literary globe-trotting existence on the
back of his first novel, well received but not matched since. He’s bitter,
cynical and not above taking revenge on a critic he blames for his decline. At
conventions around the world he repeatedly bumps into Holly Sykes, now a
successful author herself with a book about her ‘radio voices’ experiences.
Crispin is at first dismissive of her credentials, but after experiencing one
of her psychic episodes first hand comes to respect, indeed love her in his own
curmudgeonly fashion. He also has brushes with someone trying to warn him about
his part in The Script; when he brushes them off it doesn’t end well.
2025: At last someone who knows what The
Script is – Marinus is an ‘atemporalist’ and through his narrative all the
weird stuff becomes clearer. It is all part of the centuries old conflict
between the good and the evil of their kind, which seems to be building to a
cataclysmic clash. Holly Sykes, visiting New York, is an unknowing pawn in the end-game,
which game will end with few survivors.
2043: Holly survived, but to what end?
Eighteen years later it is a world much changed and in a ‘post-darkening’
decline, sans oil, sans internet, and running low on food and essential
medicines. Back at the ancestral smallholding in rural Ireland she ekes out an
existence, caring as best she can for her two grandchildren – Aoife’s daughter Lorelei
and Rafiq an adopted refugee boy – for whom the future looks bleak. Is this
really the end that The Script demanded?
The book is a tour de force. Six hundred
pages, six novellas, intriguingly linked, covering six decades with six very
different narrators (even the one repeated individual is a different person
sixty years on). Around the gripping storylines is perceptive detail of past
and present times and speculative ideas on where current trends may lead,
chillingly, in the future.
As well as links between the novellas the
author reintroduces characters from earlier books: Hugo Lamb is Jason Taylor’s
big boy cousin in Black Swan Green; and Marinus has a bit part in The Thousand
Autumns of Jacob de Zoet.
The paranormal element intrudes only
slightly into five of the six episodes, barely affecting the mainstream stories
(while subtly laying down a breadcrumb trail towards the future); the other
episode is full-on fantasy but easily manageable even for someone generally unfamiliar
with that genre.
Another typically genre-defying David
Mitchell novel of great worth delivered with trademark fluency and style.
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