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*I received this book
as an ARC through Netgalley in exchange for an honest review
In his final moments, Kepler (one of the awesome things
about this novel is that gender is kind of irrelevant but for the sake of ease
I’m just going to refer to Kepler as a ‘he’) desperately reaches for the man
who is murdering him and jumps for the first time. A simple touch in the raging
heat of heightened trauma triggers an ability to switch between bodies. He
inhabits them like houses and often cherishes them more intimately than a lover.
The brutal and inexplicable murder of one of his ‘hosts’ sets Kepler on a quest
for answers and a dab of vengeance against the mysterious organisation hot on
his heels. Touch is a complex, considered and original thriller which will
take you on a ride across the world; crossing borders, swapping skin and
ultimately seeing through different eyes.
Claire North (one of the pseudonyms of Catherine Webb) takes
on this premise – a challenging one to do well – and doesn’t turn it into a
gimmick. Crucially, for me, she doesn’t skirt around the deeper, existential
nature of the subject. There are plenty of sci-fi novels and films about
body-snatchers, invaders or possessions but North has written something wholly
unique. Action scenes are adrenaline fuelled with the ambitious quick-change of
identities, achieved through some clever writing tricks and formatting. For all
his switching, the reader never loses trace of Kepler’s distinct identity.
The only issue I had with Touch is that it is pretty long, and moves at such a pace, that it
is therefore quite a challenge to maintain focus and keep track of everyone and
everything going on. I began to care less about the plot (hard to stay engaged
for that long, but I didn’t mind because I still enjoyed the other aspects) and
more about the way Kepler and these ghosts were searching for meaningful
existence - and the moral implications of their nature. I have delayed over
this review because I feel I cannot do the book and the complexity of its
subject matter justice, analytically, until I have read it again for clarity
and honed in on certain supporting characters. I think there’s a lot there to
draw out so this is an endorsement rather than a criticism!
The way this book explores love and relationships, when it
does, borders on revolutionary (you could argue it explores concepts like pansexuality).
Gender is certainly unimportant to Kepler, who learns to appreciate the nuances
of human behaviour:
‘You have no
preference – for either sex, I mean?”
“I have a preference
for good teeth and strong bones, I replied. “I have a preference for clear skin
and, I must admit it, I have something of a weakness for red hair, when I find
it, and it’s real”
Couple this with a stunning meditation on beauty:
“Beauty is a hard
attribute to measure. I have been a long-necked model with golden hair, my lips
fresh, my eyes wide, my skin silk. And
in this guise I found it hard to walk in my tight red heels, and bewailed how
quickly my skin lost its sheen when not pampered with a regime more
time-consuming than sense. The volume of my hair was lost after a single
wash, the fullness of my lips cracked within a day. No more than a week was I
this model of fine proportions before irritation at the maintenance drove me on
to simpler pastures. It is not beauty, in an eye, a hand, a curl of hair. I
have seen old men, their backs bent and shirts white, whose eyes look up at the
passers-by and in whose little knowing
smiles there is more beauty, more radiance of soul, than any pampered flesh.
I have seen a beggar, back straight and beard down to his chest, in whose green
eyes and greying hair was such handsomeness that I yearned to have some
fraction of him to call my own, to dress in rags and sweep impetuous through
city streets. The tiny woman, four foot eight of purple and pearl; the chubby
mother, her bum heaving against denim jeans, her voice a whip-snap between
supermarket aisles. I have been them
all, and all of them, as I regarded myself in their mirrors, were beautiful.”
I adored these passages in the book and Kepler’s personal,
inner struggle is deeply moving:
“Will put his hand on
my arm and said, “I can see you now.” “See what?” “You,” he replied. “Doesn’t
matter who you’re wearing, where you’ve come from; I wait by the car and when
you come to find me, I know it’s you.” “How?” He shrugged. “I dunno. Something
in the way you walk. Something in the way you look. Something old. I can
recognise you, whoever you are. I know who you are now.” I tried to answer and
found I had nothing. My eyes were hot, and I turned my face away and hoped he
didn’t see me cry.”
I can’t praise North enough for this. Kepler is also
certainly a morally conscious ghost. He often specifically chooses people whose
lives are in a bad place in order to put them on a better path. Sure, he may
not have a right to do this – but given his situation, it is one of the more
positive ways of using his abilities. He can be charitable in his invasion (though sometimes he drugs the body he is in so there is some kind of
explanation for their confusion and memory loss).
“I look at people in
the same way an architect might look at a great house” – or perhaps how you
might look at a house with potential for improvement/renovation. He explains
that ‘everyone needs a hobby, and
everyone was mine” – he has to find a meaningful way to live, since he must
exist in someone else’s skin. But he is also aware of all the issues – the person
who cannot explain a period of memory loss and with their life changed around
them, their body used (sometimes sordidly) – “a blink of the eye, and all things change. Consequences are only for
the ones who stay behind” and “Move
on to the next life, bigger, better than before. The next life is always better”.
His is a life of constant movement, constant change, never-ending – and to
be recognised is both his greatest desire and his greatest fear.
*this quote may
contain minor spoilers*
“I’ve known Galileo
for nearly a hundred years. He – it – loves to be loved. It is all that we ever
want. We are beautiful and we are wealthy and people love us for it, but it is
not us that is loved, merely the life we are wearing. I loved Josephine. I was…
happy when I was her. I was beautiful as Josephine. I was a person when I was
her, I was Josephine. Not some shadow playing a part, but her, whole and true,
a truth that was more whole than anything she had been. It’s that that makes
beauty. Not leg or skin or breast or face, but wholeness, total and true. I was
beautiful as Josephine, and Galileo… hasn’t been beautiful for a very long time”
There’s this overarching question throughout of ‘do you like
what you see?’ – it seems to drive everything for the ghosts and its meaning only becomes obvious as you read on. It's achingly beautiful and resonant.
“We always like what
we see, people like us. We always see how something else could be better than
what we have. Perhaps today, perhaps tomorrow, perhaps this face, perhaps these
hands, perhaps… perhaps I will be better. Perhaps no one will care for the
things I did when last I was someone else. Perhaps someone will love me.
Perhaps they will love me. Perhaps if I love them enough, they’ll have no
choice but to love me in return. Do you like what you see? we ask, and the
answer is yes, of course. I love it. I love it. If I am it, will you love me?”
The writing is stunning; the action – at times – exhilarating;
the depth and emotion – always – thought-provoking and touching.
There are
ghosts in society.
It could be you.
It could be you.
Touch is out Feb 2015
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