A haunting Orwellian novel about the terrors of state surveillance, from the acclaimed author of The Housekeeper and the Professor. 

On an unnamed island off an unnamed coast, objects are disappearing: first hats, then ribbons, birds, roses–until things become much more serious. Most of the island’s inhabitants are oblivious to these changes, while those few imbued with the power to recall the lost objects live in fear of the draconian Memory Police, who are committed to ensuring that what has disappeared remains forgotten. 

When a young woman who is struggling to maintain her career as a novelist discovers that her editor is in danger from the Memory Police, she concocts a plan to hide him beneath her floorboards. As fear and loss close in around them, they cling to her writing as the last way of preserving the past. 

A surreal, provocative fable about the power of memory and the trauma of loss,  The Memory Police is a stunning new work from one of the most exciting contemporary authors writing in any language.

I purchased a copy of this book for my own reading.

It seems like I’m on a bit of a dystopian run of late, and the letter M on my alphabet reading challenge is no different. The Memory Police brings an Orwellian vibe to a small Japanese island policed by the imposing Memory Police whose only role is to ensure disappeared things remain forgotten forever.

At first it’s only small things – hats and ribbons – things of little consequence and only a moderate inconvenience to the people of the island. Then boats, birds, roses. The Memory Police become aware of a select few people who do not forget the disappeared, and seek to round them up and remove them from society. And so begins a plot to hide R, the editor of the protagonist’s novels, in a secrete room beneath the floorboards of her home. As he gives up his life, his wife and unborn child, the world changes more and more beyond his confines.

Novels disappear, throwing the unnamed protagonist into turmoil, stripping her sense of meaning and existence from her. Eventually, it’s body parts that disappear and by the end of this harrowing novel, there is only one, troublingly innevitable conclusion.

Bleak though it was, The Memory Police is a beautiful story filled with a will and hope to retain memories and bring back what is gone. It’s a story of acceptance and adaptation as society seeks to go on in spite of ever more inconvenient disappearance. Then, it morphs into a tragedy by its conclusion, with the Memory Police leaving the island once there is nothing left to enforce. It hooked me early on and the Orwellian overtones really captured me, a fantastic read.

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