TeaHistorian and novelist Fiona Moseley acknowledged in a 2018 article for the Guardian that the city of York was a major influence on both of her careers. Childhood and adolescence in a place like York, full of time and space, can generate conflict between “the desire to live in the past and the need to extricate oneself from it”. Awake Awake, the follow-up to her previous novels, 2017’s Booker-shortlisted Elmet and 2021’s Hot Stew, deals with two types of memory: personal and historical. There are no differences at all, but as far as living in the past is concerned, they depend on each other in a complex, entangled relationship.
Narrator Mary Mooney – a novelist, also from York, and whose first book has also been shortlisted for a major award – tells the story of her mental illness. Or so it seems. It starts from childhood. We are introduced to her parents and her parents’ friends, religious academics in York; to his house in Cathedral Close; To school and her school friends, with whom she will remain in touch as she grows up. Life is a round-up of family occasions, church events and church politics, full of adventure and wild excitement in the countryside, mischief in the classroom. The details are stacked in detail and presented with photographic clarity, from her father, with his “big, pointed nose and brown eyes that looked greener than usual when he was out in the vegetable patch”, to the fall of the Twin Towers, which she remembers watching “on a television in the school staff room…looking through the door from the outside and glimpsed on the small screen”.
But although he has remained surprisingly persistent, it will turn out that some of his later memories – especially those connected with his literary success – are false. Some of the people she remembers are – or have been reassured by friends and family, doctors and therapists – unrealistic. She never met any of them. They are “phantoms”, he is forced to conclude, “who came to me with news. Memories of their fantastic stories.” The moment we understand this, Hitchcockian uncertainty pervades and drives the narrative forward.
Mary admits that she is the most unreliable of narrators. She is determined to be honest and is quick to clarify her confusion. He is on anti-psychotic medication. At the same time, we realize the artistry of the novelist in his narrative. She’s holding back, especially when it comes to the one detail we really want to know: Who was the mysterious man she believes she met at the literary dinner? What were they trying to tell her about her Nobel Prize-winning Jewish grandfather and his obscure but important role in ending World War II? What is real and what is not? What is the difference between telling stories and “telling stories”?
Soon our own memories begin to seem unreliable. Has this or that minor character appeared in the book before without our attention? Or are they a kind of unmarked prolepsis, a flicker of the future? Perhaps this is simply the result of Mary’s illness, a disorganization of the time flow following a mental breakdown?
Of course, there are two novelists at work here, and the artistry doesn’t let up until the very end. Yet, while Moseley outlines the conclusion for us, assurances are not given. Their teasing, consciously unsettling play of fictional autobiography against fictional autobiography juxtaposes everyday language and the flat delivery used to describe the aggressively misogynistic and racist inhabitants of “false” memories. If we did not clearly identify the settings against which the subsequent events take place, we would think of them as pure Lynchian invention.
“We are deeply rooted in our memories,” Moseley concluded from Mary. “They are inside us and we are inside them.” Even now, remembering his youth of seeing the towers fall – an event that was mythologized even while it was happening – he is “no longer clear whether this memory relates to reality or is constructed”. History and memory become one. The same processes work on both. In the age of conspiracy theories and fabricated news, imagination never lags behind. This understanding continually undermines his attempts to construct a “teleology” of the more corrosive events of his existence.
Meanwhile, her father, having fallen out with the dean of the minster after a superficial disagreement about a memorial service, had a moment of awakening and left the church for a commitment to Gnosticism. In an instant, the material world went away from him; She got a glimpse beneath what Mary described as “the thin film of perception that we call reality.” Whoever we are, whatever our memories, this seems to be the best we can hope for.
Awake Awake is, on the one hand, a clarion call – a candid view of contemporary moral and political failure in the UK – and, on the other, a combination of entertaining philosophical and spiritual engagement with the nature of memory. Its barely resolved uncertainties make it interesting to read, but by the end you’re not sure it was meant to be so strange.
