Find Me

Laura van den Berg

Penguin Random House

Otago Daily Times, May 23rd 2015

In a recent article for Asimov’s Science Fiction, Norman Spinrad bemoans the fact that literarily ambitious and culturally aspirational Sci Fi is drowning in tsunami of post-apocalypticschlock. In part this is because such dystopian novels lack the sense of hope and wonder that he considers core to good speculative fiction, and also because it seems to be much easier to write them badly that it is to do well. Find Me is an example of the best this genre has to offer: an intense, tightly written and thoroughly absorbing novel that I found very hard to put down.

Laura van den Berg has already published two well-received short story collections and her debut novel, Find Me, is accomplished, intense and moving exploration of memory and identity. It opens in an isolated hospital in the heart of Kansas where doctors are desperately seeking for a cure for a highly contagious and lethal virus. The story’s narrator, Joy Jones, is one of the research subjects, selected because she seems to be immune to the disease. But it soon becomes clear that the ‘experiment’, is not all that it seems. She and the 79 other participants are monitored daily by Hazmat-suit clad staff for symptoms of the illness  – silver blisters and memory loss – and weekly meetings with the doctor in charge.

Unfortunately, the only treatment is the regular recitation of positive affirmations and, one by one, the experimental subjects fall ill and are removed to isolation wards to die. Then the disease wanes across the country as suddenly and mysteriously as it first arose and the residents are now confined not as potential saviours but as reinfection risks. Despite spreading disquiet most patients and staff seem to lack the emotional strength for anything other than passively resignation. Joy, however, has found a purpose. After years of trying to forget a childhood of orphanages and foster families (an irony given the fact that memory loss is among the earliest symptoms of the disease) she has finally identified the woman who may be her mother and is determined to meet her face to face.

These scenes in the hospital form the first half of the book and are reminiscent of Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go, a resemblance also echoed in the novel’s title. The second part of the novel follows Joy’s journey across an America that is struggling to redefine itself, and into the suppressed memories that have paralysed her own life. The echoes here are of David Lynch or Donny Darko (her travelling companion is her rabbit-masked foster brother Marcus).

The events of this section are so surreal that I am not sure whether they are real or whether, by reclaiming her past, Joy has rendered herself susceptible to the virus, and they are the fevered dreams of a slowly imploding mind. I prefer the former interpretation, but either way the novel ends not with a plunge into darkness but an flowering of forgiveness that satisfies my, if not Spinrad’s, criteria for a quality work of speculative fiction.