Nabokov had a great quote on writing (worth reading in full, but for these purposes, the snippet will do): “The force and originality involved in the primary spasm of inspiration is directly proportional to the worth of the book the author will write.”
There are two beautiful spasms of imagination in Peng Shepherd’s The Book of M. One is in the first few pages. One is in the last few. Because I’d like to discuss each equally, you can rest assured that I AM GOING TO SPOIL THE ENDING.
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In just the first ten pages of the book, we are given such a ferocious spurt of imagination that it could light our minds for days if Shepherd never wrote another chapter. People’s shadows the world over start disappearing, and with them, their memories. It was never suspected until that moment that a person’s shadow was where memory was stored.
The beauty in this idea isn’t just poetic, it catches such resonance with one of the core questions in neuroscience. We’ve never been able to localize memories in the brain. Disable any one part of the brain, the remainder more or less remembers everything that the whole once did, suggesting perhaps that memories are stored by a network of relations that is self-similar at different scales. Another way of thinking about it is referred to as holonomic mind theory – that the human mind functions much the same way a hologram does, in which all of the information in the signal is nested (with some resolution errors past a point) across each subset of the signal. At least, that’s one theory. The truth is we’re properly riddled by this.
This mystery of memory’s location, which is so key to securing our sense of self in the face of a materialist worldview, already has a lot of traffic in scientific circles, to the point where I think it’s pretty pop culture-y. So kudos for finding a magical realism way to play off it.
Shepherd adds a dimension to her premise by making reality adjust to fit the mistaken memories of the shadowless, but frankly (though this is easily the most awe-inspiring and fantastical element in the book), I’m less intrigued by this element. It’s a driver of adventure, more than having something to say about the human condition. And the logic of how her world functions under these rules is a bit more confounding – whose memory takes precedence, what kinds of memories change the world around them, why hasn’t one random person forgotten what oxygen is and ended the world – so that its effects feel more random and plot-servicing than numinous.
But hell, it’s certainly fun to wander a world where statues can come to life and smash buildings, so I’m not bagging on it.
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What follows from there is a dutiful, well-crafted story exploring a post-apocalypse. If you thrill at those, you’ll thrill at this.
For me, it dragged a bit. The payoff comes in the last few pages.
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Shepherd’s second great spasm of imagination comes when a great healer type begins stitching shadows back onto people, hoping to give them their memories back. Unfortunately, only the shadow of an object appropriately invested with some kind of cognition will serve this purpose. Give a person the shadow-memories of a rock, they go crazy in rock-ish sorts of ways.
The moment that sings is around a tape recorder. Before she loses all her memories, a woman named Max wanders the country recording everything she can remember onto a tape recorder. The tape recorder’s shadow is stitched back onto a woman who the healer thinks is Max. But the healer is mistaken. The wrong woman inherits the memories stored in the recorder, and with it, the identity of Max.
So when whoops-wrong-woman meets the man she now thinks is her husband, he rejects her. She has the mind of the woman who made the recordings (we can presume Max is dead at this point), but nobody else sees her that way. The pain is tremendous. She believes she’s held out so long trying to preserve her mind so she could one day reunite with her husband, but she’s in the wrong body and he’s not having any of it.
Tragic, poignant, and this is where Shepherd closes.
Hot take: this is not where Shepherd should have closed.
This is, if anything, the more inviting spasm of imagination between the two, which begs for these characters to evolve. This begs for two people, one of whom believes they are married, and the other of whom is fighting a profound repulsion to the woman who thinks she’s his wife, to explore what their relationship is now. Because it’s not as simple and pat as they don’t have one.
And in the process, this invites Shepherd to explore what it means to have selfhood, to answer serious human questions in ways that only a fantasy premise can engage in. Is it enough to believe that you’re a specific person? To have all the memories of that person? To walk in the sack of carbon that collected those memories originally? To be recognized as that person by the people who know you?
If I had my druthers, this is the midway point of the book. Strip out a certain amount of post-apocalyptic wrangling, and write me a half of a book about two people trying to see if they’re still married, in different bodies.
Or – just in case she’s reading her reviews – fine material for the sequel.