KEY POINTS:
To be lost inside someone else's weirdness is one of the pleasures of reading, especially when there's a mystery that unfolds in a creepy, complex way so that you find yourself mulling it over at odd times, trying to piece it together. And that's when you realise that this novel really has its hooks in you, despite the fact that it's flawed in certain clunky ways - overuse of the word labyrinth, for a start, and a rather ponderous self-consciousness about its literary allusions. Still, these are quibbles. What an achievement to replicate on the page someone else's amnesia. James Purdew has been living fairly happily in Amsterdam with his girlfriend when he realises that there are three years of his life to which he has no key. He goes back to the city in which he lived those three years, the city of "H", in the north of England, and becomes a detective of his own past. Mysterious people of unstable, shifting identity cross his path, and there is a powerful surreality to his experience. We sense strongly that things are probably not as James thinks they are. He finds work renovating a house for an enigmatic employer; it seems James has lived in this house before, and it may contain answers. James finds a manuscript in the house titled Confessions of a Killer, and this becomes a parallel with his own narrative and with his own diary writing, which he titles Diary of an Amnesiac.
Taylor has much to say about memory and the fracturing of the self that occurs with the passing of time. If this seems very existential, it is, and we are also treated to an exploration of solipsism, a central organising idea in the characterisation of James. It won't be for everybody, but there is much that satisfies as the mystery is solved.
* Faber, $37.99
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