Touch

Claire North

Hachette

Otago Daily Times, April 11th 2015

The narrator of The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August, Claire North’s possessed a recursive form of immortality. In her new novel, Touch, she presents a rather creepier alternative, ‘ghosts’ who can transfer their consciousness from body to body at the slightest touch of skin. Such possessions are as long or as short as the whim of the ghost, from moments, just enough time to misplace a wallet or drive around the block, or for so long that those possessed awake to find decades vanished in the blink of an eye.

The narrator, Kepler, has been a ghost for hundreds of years and has made its living at times as an ‘estate agent’, finding suitable bodies for fellow ghosts to inhabit and providing those essential little details – shoe size, favourite food, mother’s maiden name – that they need to successfully step into their ready-made lives. But he has hired himself out to ordinary people as well, who use him to take their bodies into situations they are too scared to face themselves, or to inhabit somebody else’s for revenge or even, on one occasion, to rescue a wayward daughter’s reputation. And over the years he has developed affection for the bodies he inhabits, along with a certain moral sensibility. He has formed genuine and enduring friendships with some his hosts, negotiates a price for occupation with a body’s ‘real’ owner before taking it over when possible, and tries to leave him or better off on departure than when he found them. So when a man deliberately kills one of his skins, despite knowing Kepler is no longer in residence, he takes it very personally. What follows is a cat-and mouse chase across Eastern and Central Europe between Kepler and the network of assassins who are tracking him, whom he suspects are led his arch-enemy, a ghost called Galileo, whose delight in slaughter is legendary among their kind.

North (the pen-name of Catherine Griffin) manages the delicate balance between fear and fascination brilliantly. Her invisible protagonists tap into the same primal fear that make Stephen Moffat’s Weeping Angels and The Silence far scarier than any Dalek, but Kepler is in his own way enough of a sympathetic and morally interesting character that I found myself caring about his fate (although its physical gender is fluid, there is a sense that the voice is male). Nor is Touch a mere thriller, in fact it might almost be better to describe it as romance, with Kepler’s actions driven for a love of humanity as voracious as Galileo’s unfulfilled desire for love that is ultimately expressed as murderous rage. I kept reading despite myself, and I am still thinking about it days later. But it is not a book for the faint hearted. Tell me, have you been losing time recently?

https://www.odt.co.nz/entertainment/books/complex-haunting-tale-ghosts-and-their-human-hosts