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476 pages, Hardcover
First published May 17, 2016
Life is too short, and sometimes brutal,
and in the end we have only each other.
Nothing else matters.
As memory of me faded, so did a part of myself. Whoever that Hope Arden is who laughs with her friends, smiles with her family, flirts with her lover, resents her boss, triumphs with her colleagues – she ceased to exist, and it has been surprising for me to discover just how little of me is left behind, when all that is stripped away.The book explored several interesting ideas, the most salient being identity. How much of ourselves is who we are as opposed to how other people relate to us. Many of us behave in ways dictated by the social circumstance we find ourselves in. We act differently in a work environment compared to a social environment full of friends compared to the city bus. Our identity is partial a product of the social environment we reside in, as we impact and are impacted by others.
I exist in this physical world as sure as stone, but in the world of men – in that world that is collective memory, in the dream-world where people find meaning, feeling, importance – I am a ghost. Only in the present tense am I real.But for Hope those pressures and feedbacks don't exist. There is no external steadying pressure on her. No one to tell her when she is acting out of line or that she needs a hug and a nice mug of cocoa. She had to craft an identity and a code of conduct to meticulously stick too or else she could very easily of lost herself to insanity. She sees it as a horrible burden, but another character who gets to know her (or at least as well as a Hope's condition allows) sees it as a marvelous gift:
“There’s your mistake. You have a gift, Hope, one of the greatest ever given. You are outside it all; you are free of it.”I found this vein of the story very thought provoking and insightful.
“Free of …”
“Of people. Of society. You have no need to conform, what’s the point? No one will thank you for it, no one will remember you, and so you have the freedom to choose your own path, your own humanity, to be who you want to be, not some puppet shaped by the TV and the magazines, by the advertising men, by the latest definition of work or play, by ideas of sex, gender, by—”
“Perfection?”
“By perfection. You choose your own perfect. You choose to be who you are, and the world cannot shape you, unless you permit it. The world cannot move you, unless it is by your own welcoming in. You are free, Hope. You are more free than anyone living.”
No – the perfect life is to have an annual salary of £120,000, an Aston Martin, a £1.6-million-pound home, a wife, two children and at least two foreign holidays a year. Perfection is an idol built upon oppression. Perfection is the heaven that kept the masses suppressed; the promise of a future life that quells rebellion. Perfection is the self-hatred an overweight woman feels when she sees a slim model on TV; perfection is the resentment the well-paid man experiences when he beholds a miserable millionaire. Perfection kills.Much of the book revolved around this app and the harmful impact it had on the users and society in general. But the app isn't the villain, it is merely a stand in for the myriad of pressures society ALREADY exerts upon the population in the real world. Hope, a person who is "free" of such social pressure given her transitory state in the minds of others, stands as polar opposite to this phenomenon and the tension between the two creates a really fascinating read.
Taster classes – I am the queen of taster classes. There are fitness, language, sewing, cooking, painting and martial arts classes across the world where, for weeks at a time, I was invited not to pay for my tuition because “the first one’s free”. After ten weeks of attendance I’d say that I’d “done a little” and after twenty the experience would usually lose its value, as the length of time it would take a teacher to discover that I had experience would be as long as the class itself, and I could progress no further."It is little things like that which show just how much thought North has put into this concept. She treats the condition in its totality instead of merely where it helps advance the story on top of writing extremely sympathetic and fully fleshed out characters. I greatly enjoyed this reading experience and look forward to many decades of enjoying North's work.