Marcus Sedgwick - Mister Memory

Rating: 4/5

Review:
Good, but not Sedgwick's best

I enjoyed this book, particularly in its later stages.  It's perhaps not Marcus Sedgwick at his brilliant best, but it's still very good.

Set in Paris in 1899, this is the story of Marcel Despres who has a remarkable gift: he remembers *everything*.  This is also a grave burden as he has extreme difficulty sorting the important things from the irrelevant in his memories which gives him considerable social difficulties, too.  The book opens with his arrest for the murder of his wife and what plays out is both an investigation of what memory is and what it means to us and a conspiracy thriller.  It's a fine, ambitious idea which is only partially successfully realised, I think.

Sedgwick is a brilliant storyteller with a remarkable gift for getting inside his subjects' heads and really brining them convincingly to life.  He manages this very well, but only some of the time here.  The opening 100 pages especially seemed rather stodgy to me.  He creates a superb atmosphere of decadent, violent fin-de-siècle Paris and gives us believable characters, but it all feels a bit slow and worthy in a way that, for example, the brilliant She Is Not Invisble never is.  As the pace of the plot begins to pick up things improve considerably and what could be a rather run-of-the-mill story of Battling Corruption In High Places is very well developed with building tension, carefully placed revelation and some genuinely surprising events making it exciting and gripping…eventually.

Throughout this, the character and struggles of Marcel Despres are explored and again, it's only partially successful.  It's believable and in places rather interesting, but it all hangs rather heavily rather than illuminating the book, so I was relieved when the plot began to move along and Marcel's mental state receded into the background a little.

Nathan Filer, Gavin Extence, Jem Lester and many others including Marcus Sedgwick himself have shown what excellent, involving books can be centred on disability and mental illness.  This doesn't really succeed as well as some, but it's still well worth reading.  As always with Sedgwick, it's readable, well researched and has plenty of value to say – it's just not quite as brilliant as some of his others.