Memories, memories

Tom Webber salutes a stunning portrayal of dementia

Memory has a patchy quality at the best of times; it tends to lose detail like a fading photograph. Jake Jameson, the protagonist of this outstanding debut novel, which has been longlisted for this year's Orange Prize, has a particularly desperate relationship with the past. He is an architect in his 60s, nearing retirement and taking long, backward looks at his existence. There have been achievements: buildings erected according to his modernist vision, an innovative, glass-walled house he designed for himself, marriage, children. But the episodes from Jake's past that revisit him bring with them feelings of profound failure - as father, husband or son - and the sense that he has still not fully understood some of the people closest to him.

  1. The Wilderness
  2. by Samantha Harvey

Jake's apprehension of his history is further beset by a devastating inevitability: he has Alzheimer's and all his attempts to order his memories are going to be thoroughly and irretrievably unravelled.

Samantha Harvey barely puts a foot wrong in telling this crushing tale. It is a piece of literature seamlessly woven from extremely controlled prose, and peppered with vivid images that are recalled with haiku-like clarity. Harvey conjures both atmosphere and beauty, but the impact of this novel comes from its merciless portrayal of dementia.

The narrative clings tightly to Jake as it describes his growing puzzlement. His state of mind is made painfully clear by the novel's structure, which takes place on two planes. There is Jake's present, where he drifts inside "the endless drudgery of the days", and his past, which holds the keys to the identity he is trying so hard to preserve.

Jake's life has been filled with memorable, original characters, the most important of whom are women: his mother, his deceased wife, a flirt from his married days turned lifelong correspondent, his daughter (whose very existence is unclear) and, finally, a lame-duck friend from his youth with whom he now appears to have fallen into a horribly lopsided relationship. Memories of sex, always an area for reassessment, come back to him in living colour, as do landmarks in his life, pieces of advice and conversations he seems not to have fully comprehended at the time.

Then, gradually and carefully, the book starts to disorientate the reader with the revelation that none of Jake's memories is reliable. Descriptions of the important phases of his life are subtly undermined by his recollections of them. Consistency drains from his personal memories, and the scenes from his past start to overlap as certain themes and patterns begin endlessly to repeat. A colour, an object, a smell, a conversation, each with a specific significance for Jake, will creep into another chapter and reappear with altered meanings, until no details can be taken for granted.

Given the unavoidable nature of his progress and the almost unbearable coda Jake's confusion reaches, this could easily have been a depressing read, but a certain levity is maintained throughout. The lucidity with which characters from Jake's past are evoked gives them a kind of fabulous immortality.

At its heart, The Wilderness is a seemingly disconnected collection of the narratives that constitute the essence of Jake's life. But it manages to be much more than this: a forensic examination of loss and misunderstanding, a paean to the vital force of stories, and an incredibly moving look at a sword of Damocles that hangs over us all.

• To order The Wilderness for £15.99 with free UK p&p, go to or call 0330 333 6847

Today's best video

Today in pictures