Awake Awake by Fiona Mozley review – in search of false memories | Fiction

Thistorian and author Fiona Mozley agreed 2018 Guardian piece that the city of York greatly influenced both his works. Childhood and youth in a place like York, from time to time, can lead to a conflict between “the desire to live in the past and the need to remove oneself”. Awake Awake, a sequel to his previous novel, 2017’s Booker-shortlisted Elmet and 2021 Hot Soupit involves two types of memory: personal and historical. They are not really opposites, but speaking of being in the past they feed off each other in a complicated, confused relationship.

Narrator Mary Mooney – also a novelist, also from York, whose first novel has been shortlisted for a major prize – describes her mental illness. Or so it seems. It starts in childhood. We are introduced to his parents and his parents’ friends, religious students at York; at his home in Cathedral Close; at school and school friends, who will join them as they grow up. Life and family affairs, church affairs and church politics, taste and fun and country fun, class violence. The details are well represented, from his father, with “a big, gray nose and gray eyes that look greener than usual when they are out on the lawn”, to the fall of the Twin Towers, which he remembers seeing “on television in the school staff room… looking in the door from outside and looking through the small window”.

But despite his incredible persistence, it appears that some of his later memories – especially those associated with his literary success – are false. Some of the people he remembers are – or were convinced by friends and family, doctors and healers – blind. He has never met any of them. They are the “wraiths”, he is forced to say, “who came to me with stories, to remember their good tales.” Hitchcockian uncertainty pervades and drives the narrative from the moment we understand this.

Mary admits that she is the most unreliable of storytellers. He is determined to be honest and is quick to clarify his confusion. He takes anti-psychotic medication. At the same time, we hear in his story the skill of the writer. They still do, especially when it comes to the one thing we want to know: which strange men do they believe they met at dinner? What did he want to tell her about her Nobel Prize-winning Jewish grandfather and his little-known but important role in ending World War II? What is reality and what is not? What is the difference between telling a story and “telling a story”?

Soon our memories begin to seem unreliable. Has this or that little person already appeared in the book, without realizing it? Or are they a kind of unrecognizable, visible prolepsis of the future? Maybe it was just because of Mary’s illness, the interruption of her time to rest?

There are, of course, two authors working here, and the technology will not be finished until the end. However, while Mozley gives us a glimpse of the finale, no guarantees are made. His satirical, unsettling play of anti-fiction and fantasy interweaves everyday language and simplistic descriptions used to describe misogynists and critics of “fake” memories. If we hadn’t clearly identified the setting in which this final scene takes place, we might have thought it was a Lynchian invention.

“We live inside our memories,” Mozley concludes Mary. “They are in us and we are in them.” Even now, remembering that he was young when he saw the collapse of the tower – a fictional event even when it happened – “he no longer knows if this memory is connected to reality or constructed”. History and memory are intertwined. The same methods work for both. In the age of conspiracy theories and fantasy stories, fiction is never far away. This understanding hinders his attempt to create a “teleology” of the most destructive events of his existence.

His father, meanwhile, having fallen out with the minister after a major disagreement at a memorial service, has his moment of awakening and leaves the church to devote himself to gnosticism. In a moment, the physical world is gone from him; he had an image under what Mary describes as “the thin film we call reality”. Whoever we are, whatever we remember, this seems like the best we can hope for.

Awake Awake, on the one hand, a clear call – a clear sense of the failure of morals and politics in the UK – and on the other, a fascinating meeting of philosophy and magic and the culture of memory. Its unpredictability makes for fascinating reading, but in the end you’re not sure it was made to be so unusual.