Dissolution by Nicholas Binge
I would like to thank the author and Harper Voyager for an advance copy of this novel in exchange for a fair and honest review
Publisher - Harper Voyager
Published – Out now
Price – £16.99 hardback £8.99 ebook
Maggie Webb has lived the last decade caring for her elderly husband, Stanley, as memory loss gradually erases all the beautiful moments they created together. It’s the loneliest she’s ever felt in her life.
When a mysterious stranger named Hassan appears at her door, he reveals a shocking truth: Stanley isn’t losing his memories. Someone is actively removing them to hide a long-buried secret from coming to light. If Maggie does what she’s told, she can reverse it. She can get her husband back.
Led by Hassan and his technological marvels, Maggie breaks into her husband’s mind, probing the depths of his memories in an effort to save him. The deeper she dives, the more she unravels a mystery spanning continents and centuries, each layer more complex than the last.
But Hassan cannot be trusted. Not just memories are disappearing, but pieces of reality itself. If Maggie cannot find out what Stanley did all those years ago, and what Hassan is after, she risks far more than her husband’s life. The very course of human history hangs in the balance.
Memory is one of the most powerful senses. A smell, a turn or a place can suddenly take us back to key moments in our lives. At the same time, it can let us down trying to remember where you out the door keys or which shelf a particular book may be hiding on. As we get older, we worry will our memory fades more and what that signals as we become elderly. In Nicholas Binge’s interesting science fiction mystery novel Dissolution we explore what memories mean to an elderly couple who find themselves part of a bigger and longer mystery that is after decades coming to a dangerous endgame.
An elderly woman in her 80s Margaret Webb awakes in a strange room like a swimming pool and is asked to explain what has been happening to her the last few hours. Margaret has been over the last few years torn that her husband Stanley’s great mind has been vanishing with dementia and has reached the stage she has had to move him to the Sunrise retirement home. Now though a strange young man named Hassan has arrived to tell her the home is actually part of a much more dangerous group that experiments on memories and that Stanley’s previously unknown work in this area is key to their eventual aim. Hassan helps Margrate rescue Stanley but this uncovers a web of secrets and the key for Maragret requires her to use new technology to explore them in Stanley’s memories herself or the world itself could be in danger.
There is a quite a lot to enjoy about this novel that explores humanity’s obsession with memory and has three very unusual characters at the heart of it. The big mystery is what has Stanley been doing and why is everyone now trying to extract secrets from a man with dementia? The unusual angle is that it is focused on the elderly Margaret having to effectively enter Stanley’s mind and memories and explore a hidden past. This is refreshing in several ways having an elderly character who looks at the world as an older person – body aches, the way people talk down to the old and yet she ploughs on and does her own thing. It also opens up how our memories don’t always match up. Watching her meeting Stanley for the first time she is astounded how healthy and beautiful she appears to him and that’s a reminder our significant others may see us very differently to how we see ourselves. There is a mix of inception and time travel going on here which is a compelling way of pushing the story along as nip along Stanley’s life is a seemingly random order to put clues together. There is also a sense of danger not just from mysterious groups after Stanley’s information but also if Maragret interferes with a memory that can break things apart in a very impressive visual way that escalates throughout the book. I also really liked that Margaret is less bothered about saving the world than keeping the love of her life alive she feels refreshingly human.
We also have an unusual conspiracy style mystery to unpick that takes place from the 1950s to the 2020. We go from a UK private school where ethe ambitious Stanley finds himself very alone among the upper classes, but a strange teacher and some fellow outsiders join forces to work on the power of memory and pushing their own skills to the limit and this sets in motion a bigger exploration into memory. What is it for, why do we forget, and could we ever get all our memories back? What would that allow us to do? Its an unusual angle and works neatly with the memory time travel idea we are seeing develop and brings moments of danger and a slight sense of cosmic horror in the background getting menacingly closer.
I do have a few niggles though. While I really liked Margaret and the younger Stanley as a couple of characters, I could have done with a little more time featuring the couple being the great loving couple we are told they were. It would have slightly cemented why Maragret is doing all of this adventuring if we could see what they were like before Stanley’s dementia grew too strong. The other angle I’d had liked fleshed out is the historical aspect. While we zoom to the 1960s and 1950s I never get a few for a sense of place from these scenes as the action tends to take place in classrooms and labs for the majority of the book and a little more sense of period and the juxtaposition of modern and the past would have given the tale an even more epic feel.
Overall, I enjoyed Dissolution a lot. The key mystery is a good one to plunge into and this is a fast paced and unusually constructed story with an intriguing set of characters that you don’t usually get in an SF novel these days. If you enjoy stories where you must put the clues together then this will be an entertaining read for you!
