Claire North is certainly one of the authors I admire the
most. She takes on some of the most technically challenging and fiddly subjects to
write about and is very versatile. Yet Touch,
Harry August and Hope all tackle that human desire to leave a mark and to mean something.
To mean something as a human being/life-form and what it is about yourself that
is memorable and can leave an impression. She always challenges you to think
beyond the bounds of the physical and the corporeal. In her books she has tackled the
limits of gender, sexuality, time, memory and more. She is unafraid and quite
unique and because of all this, I will pick up her books without hesitation.
The Sudden Appearance of Hope, a bit like Touch, is part
globe-trotting thriller and part existential crisis/analysis. The focus of the
plot (or one of them) is an app called Perfection which sets goals and rewards
for people to ‘better themselves’. I read The Circle by Dave Eggers just a
month or two before this and they definitely both explore this technological
dystopian theme very well. While you’re reading, you only have to look up and
around you to recognise how precariously balanced society is and how easily it
could slip into something quite frightening. What Perfection is actually
pushing is conformity – a very static set of ideals based on money, body-image
and the like. Both The Circle and The Sudden Appearance of Hope touch upon the
idea of the end of privacy, the constant need to share, the setting of goals
and the reward schemes that only reward certain, approved behaviours – a subtle
brainwashing and defining of worthiness. The chasing of targets and the
relentless measuring of your life by strangers and trend-setters, telling you
what it is to be worthy and when you deserve reward is juxtaposed with Hope’s
innate condition of forgettability. The moment she turns her back, she is
forgotten – by her family, her ‘friends’, by anyone she meets – except technology.
The only path she leaves is digital.
Hope cannot have a job, cannot own property, cannot live in
the ways society usually deems meaningful – she cannot legally exist as she is
forgotten within a minute. Hope survives by becoming a criminal – an international
jewel thief. It is as she sets out to steal a jewelled bracelet that Hope and
Perfection are set on a collision course. Shaken by the death of someone
connected to it and seeing the sinister potential of its elements of mind
control, Hope sets herself a meaningful mission – to take it down.
Interestingly, Hope does meet someone like her, a fellow ‘forgettable’,
who it seems becomes memorable by following the scheme of the app and letting
it change him and help him conform. This leaves Hope with a heart-breaking
choice – should she adopt the app herself and become memorable and known to her
family, but as someone else, or honour them in retaining her own sense of
integrity and difference? What if the cure is something worse than the disease?
The only person who remembers Hope fully is her little sister, who has a form of
brain condition.
Yet the process of writing her story is also a way of
enacting meaning and leaving a trace. ‘I write this to be remembered.’ is one of
the opening lines of the novel: ‘Whoever you are: these are my words. This is
my truth. Listen, and remember me’. To cope Hope takes it upon herself to talk
to scholars and monks ‘men and women who’d been held in solitary confinement
for ears on end. You find the happiness
you can, one said. Sometimes it’s
hard, sometimes you gotta dig deep, but it’s there, the thing inside that you
can be content.’ For Hope’s condition is a life sentence of its own – her world
can only be a long solitary confinement with fleeting instances of connection.
‘Alone you can lose
yourself, or you may find yourself, and most of the time you do both’.
One of the main repeated encounters Hope has throughout her
quest is with a lady called Byron, someone who seems somewhat envious of Hope’s
condition – telling her that ‘to be
forgotten is to be free, you know that, don’t you?’. And this is another
interesting discourse that unfolds throughout the narrative – the definition of
freedom, and how people would live without inhibition, knowing they could
never be caught, they could do anything, get away with anything. Byron is
excited by the prospect, wanting to live without limits, not understanding Hope’s
discipline (‘you have no need to conform,
what’s the point? No one will thank you for it, no one will remember you.’)
– but Hope comes to realise that freedom also means honouring the freedom of
those around her – that self-discipline is crucial and she must impose her own
limits and meaning (the idea that freedom that impinges upon the freedom of
others is wrong). To some extent – you have to ‘permit yourself to be defined by the world that surrounds you’. The
whole exchange and the relationship between these two women is written
brilliantly – in some ways they are so similar and yet there are fundamental
philosophical differences that are unpacked very neatly and effectively.
‘I impose disciplines upon
myself, discourse, reason, knowledge…’
‘To fill the place
where society should be?’
‘Yes. And to keep me
sane. To help me see myself as others might see.’
Some of the most poignant passages come in Hope’s longing to
mean something to her family and the brilliance of North’s writing shines
through in one of the descriptions of Hope’s mother:
‘Mum comes in. Her
hair is bright white, cut down to the surface of her skull, and age has made
her face something extraordinary. Each part of it needs an atlas to describe;
her chin is many chins, still small and sharp but etched with muscle and line,
layered one upon the other. Her cheeks are contoured bone and silky rivers of
skin, her eyebrows waggle against great parallels of thought on her forehead,
her mouth is encased in smile lines and pout lines and scowl lines and worry
lines and laughter lines and there is no
part of her which is not in some way written over with stories’.
Hope can see all the markings of experience and all the
imperfections and find beauty in them – a kind of beauty that Perfection would
never recognise. She knows that her mother could never love the being that
Perfection would make of her.
As a character, you pity Hope, but at no point does the book
make an emotional spectacle of her tragic condition – it productively explores
the nature of it and draws up on it poignantly when it needs to. The parallel
plot involving the jewel heist and Perfection balances the narrative and paces
it, while also cementing the relevance of these timeless, universal questions
in the modern, digital age. An age in which we leave a constant digital trail but long,
enduring, meaningful engagements are in decline and under threat.
The only thing I do find with some of North's book is that it's sometimes hard to engage with, keep track of and remember the wide variety of secondary characters (if you’re not
careful, you might find yourself a bit
lost) but do persevere and revisit – it’s worth it in the end and you will find
yourself wanting to go back to this book again. Touch was one of my Books of 2015.
Fittingly, The Sudden Appearance of Hope is
unforgettable.
*Thank you to Orbit of Little Brown Book Group UK and NetGalley for letting me read a digital ARC in exchange for honest review. The Sudden Appearance of Hope is published on 19th May 2016.
Further quotes:
- The past was just a present that had been, the future was a present yet to come, and only now remained, and I stood by the sea, recovering my landlegs from the road, and wept.
- Knowledge. What should I do with this place inside me where experience – tears of joy, shrieks of laughter, the anxiety of work, the warmth of friends, the love of family, the expectations of the world – what should I do with that place which was never filled? I put knowledge there. And in knowledge, I find myself. This sounds like an intellectual void where heart should be, but look and you may find…
- Look for the words “perfect woman” and you find bodies. Diagrams, explaining that the perfect face belongs to an actress with smoky eyes, the perfect hair comes from a princess; the perfect waist is barely narrow enough to support the generous breasts that balance on it; legs disproportionately long, smile that says “take me”. Photoshopped features combining the faces of movie stars and models, pop idols and celebrities. Who is the perfect woman? According to the internet, she is a blonde white girl with bulimia; no other characteristics are specified.
- Know thyself, and know everyone else. Having no one else to know me, having no one to catch me or lift me up, tell me I’m right or wrong, having no one to define the limits of me. I have to define myself, otherwise I am nothing, just a … liquid that dissolves. Know yourself. But finding definition without all the… the daily things that give you shape…’
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