Tell Me An Ending by Jo Harkin

I would like to thank Hutchinson Heinemann/Penguin and Anne from Random Things Tours for an advance copy of this novel in exchange for a fair and honest review

Publisher - Hutchinson Heinemann / Penguin

Published - Out Now

Price - £16.99 hardback £9.99 Kindle eBook

What if you didn't have to live with your worst memories?

Across the world, thousands of people are shocked to receive an email telling them that they once chose to have a traumatic memory removed. Now they are being given the chance to get that memory back.

For Mei, William, Oscar and Finn there is a piece missing, but they're not sure what. And each of them must decide if the truth is worth the pain, or better left unknown.

For Noor, who works at the memory clinic Nepenthe, the process of reinstating their patients' memories begins to shake the moral foundations of her world. As she delves deeper into the programme, she will have to risk everything to uncover the true human cost of this miraculous technology.

An exploration of secrets, grief, identity and belonging - of the stories we tell ourselves, and come to rely on, Tell Me An Ending is a sharp, dark and devastating novel about the power and danger of memory.

Memory is a fascinating subject. Very few of us can remember every single thing to ever happen to us so we are instead often made of key memories. You can remember a great holiday; a hospital visit and when you heard Doctor Who was coming back. But memories cast a shadow for many reasons just the word school tends to bring me shivers and then there are the memories which over time fragment and alter. Childhood becomes ever more distant and time is fluid - hence why the 90s are not that far away are they? What though if you could remove the painful memories - would you do it? If I told you you’d had such a procedure but you have no memory of it then would you want to know again what you’ve lost? This is the tough question that Jo Harkin poses the reader in their excellent science fiction novel Tell Me An Ending where all the characters upon finding about this procedure have to decide what they’re going to do about it.

In the 1990s it was discovered that it was possible to eliminate memories and as per usual this leads to a chance to make money. The company Nepenthe has specialised in two types of service those who knowingly ask for a ‘wipe’ perhaps to reduce memory of a traumatic event and those particular patients who ask to have the wipe and also memory of the erasure itself. Following a court case that raised issues with this latter practise the company now needs to alert their patients that they had the service and offer the chance to have them restored.

This is a fantastic intelligent novel exploring the ethics of memory erasure and what our memories mean to us. Harkin gives us four patients to walk alongside with bookended by two of the scientists working at Nepenthe. In sone ways a thriller as we try to work out what each patient’s secret was but also we soon get the impression that Nepenthe was doing a lot more than a simple service.

We get the young troubled student Mei who has left university after suffering a number of issues and finds herself at a crossroads. Haunted by strange memories of a place she does not remember going to. We meet the unexpectedly wealthy Oscar who is personal and also totally incapable of any long term commitments. He feels constantly pursued and is now hiding in Morocco ever more conscious he believes he has done something awful. Then we get the middle-aged retired policeman Will who following seeing a picture of a dead young woman has been thrown into a bleak depression he cannot seem to escape; and finally we get wealthy married couple Finn and Mirande who live the dream of a happy long time romance that has led to many adventures and a happy family suddenly faced with the knowledge that Mirande once too had memories erased.

What makes this novel work is the ambiguity the reader is asked to process in this dilemma. We make our own initial assumptions as to what each patient did that required erasure and then we find out the truth. I am not going to spoil this but each time we are challenged to ask was this the right thing to do. Some answers may be easier than others. There will be consequences whatever happens to our patients and we are made to feel their anguish, pain, renewal or in some cases recurrence. The storylines underline how personal our memories are and what can seem trivial can be devastating to others and our own interpretation of our own responsibility for events can be equally devastating too. Just when we think the wipes are unnecessary we also can see their sometime benefits. We can also see that hiding our secrets may not always be the best solution either. The fact there is no easy answer here is I think the key point the book makes.

Each storyline is compelling from Mei’s youthful realisation she can resist her parent’s influences; Oscar’s constant paranoia; Will’s escalating feeing of hopelessness and with the character of Finn we see someone from the outside pondering what his wife’s secret could be and what it means for their own life together - has it all been a lie? I can’t tell you much more but each storyline is delivered very skilfully.

Then we get at Nepenthe too other key characters to help the exploration of the issues. Linking through is the arch scientist Louise wealthy, confident and sure of her purpose she starts to get suspect by her young protege Noor of being up to something. Noor is a fascinating character - a closed book who hated to share anything of herself with anyone and yet has recently found herself tormented by a love affair with an ex-patient and her complicated adoration of Louise. Moor’s journey in the story is fascinating coming from something who sees the world as binary loving her science and having to grapple with the consequences of Nepenthe’s technology on others and her growing suspicion that Louise is behind a lot of things. Again Harkin is clever in their plotting that by the end we aren’t 100% sure who is the pure villain here and the reader has to debate what actually has been done wrong. I think ultimately it shows science without consideration of consequences is dangerous for all of us but I loved the way I was never told I was right.

Great science fiction explores a topic and gives us something to chew over. There are growing areas of research into memory erasure and this book explores if humanity could do this then what could happen if we are not careful how we control it’s use. Thoughtful, beautifully written and ambitious it’s a brilliant read I strongly recommend!