At its core, Dissolution by Nicholas Binge is a love story about a fiercely determined 83 year-old woman who is trying to recapture the memory and hence the identity of her husband whose selfhood has mostly disappeared. But Dissolution feels nothing like a romance. It is a tense thriller in which the titular phenomenon threatens to destroy all memories and identities if it is not contained. The story begins with a countdown, letting us know that in eleven hours all will be lost unless Maggie, the heart and soul of this narrative, can help a mysterious interrogator named Hassan retrieve the secret of controlling the memory-dissolving force that seems to be lost in her husband Stanley’s past.
The story is built around the premise that “our identities are defined by our experiences, and our experiences are just a collection of our memories“ (Kindle edition, Location 871). They are what make us human. If we lose memory, we stop being ourselves, stop being human. Under Hassan’s guidance, Maggie needs to plunge into Stanley’s memories to find the secret to stop the dissolution. This becomes a form of time travel, and the narrative intertwines with great skill chapters on Stanley’s past and Maggie’s present until they converge in an exciting climax with a love-affirming twist.
So we go back from the present of 2021 to Stanley’s youth in the early 50s at a school where he has no friends and feels he isn’t seen because socially he is nobody. Soon, though, his talent is recognized by a teacher named Waldman who invites him to a special class of a select few brilliant students. That class becomes the scene of Stanley’s intellectual growth and his bonding with a few good friends, especially Jacques and Raph.
Some time after leaving school under tragic circumstances, Raph and Stanley are deep into their scientific work on memory, with disappointing results. Jacques, who has nominally been working with them, reveals his own secret lab. Amidst strange looking experiments involving human organs, he claims that he has found a source of the power to control or destroy memory, but containing it is the problem. He has a quite grisly method of doing so temporarily, and when Raph and Stanley realize what he is doing, there is a terrible rupture between them. Be prepared that these scenes involve a lot of violence and body horror.
Thereafter, the friends go their separate ways. Stanley eventually embarks on a world-wide journey that takes him to the Australian outback and indigenous peoples of different continents as he seeks to find the source of the great power that could help or destroy humanity.
Maggie, under Hassan’s guidance, makes multiple trips into Stanley’s past to find the answer to controlling this memory-power that is so dangerous. She experiences a form of time travel by reaching through his memories so that she appears in her present age in the midst of critical scenes from Stanley’s life, including special moments of their relationship as they were falling in love and then getting married. At times, she is so overwhelmed with feelings that she steps right into a scene where she appears in physical form, capable of interacting with the people in the memory.
That threatens to alter reality forever. It also gives the memory-power a chance to catch up with her and wipe away all traces of the experience, as if it had never existed. Some of these scenes reminded me of the film, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, when one member of a young couple is having memories erased and the two of them are racing to escape the growing blackness of oblivion. There is a similar danger here except much worse. This barely contained power can potentially wipe out everyone’s memory and identity in a mass dissolution.
We learn most of this through Maggie’s narration to Hassan under the pressure of a countdown clock that shows how many hours and minutes are left until the great dissolution begins. Binge skillfully manages the tension of the narrative and gradually reveals what is going on. Hassan himself is an interesting character, and as the antagonist of the story is a combination of obsessed scientist and the monster he creates. The plot has several twists and reveals, but the best one is left to the very end. It is one that flows directly out of the love Maggie has for Stanley, no matter what state his mind is in and becomes quite moving as a result.
Dissolution is overall a fine combination of sci-fi thriller and keenly observed human relationships. It’s not just about memory as a subject of experimentation but memories of intensely felt lives and a love that persists and deepens over fifty years. As someone who has emerged into old age with such a relationship, I found it especially gratifying to live through Maggie’s struggles to help her man and hold onto her love for him at all costs. How many sci-fi novels are there that feature a character in her 80s who hasn’t gone through some sort of rejuvenation process? But I did have reservations while reading the novel. Some of the sci-fi elements, especially time travel, were waved over, and some obscured by horror scenes. Pulling in aboriginal lore felt unnecessary and a bit appropriative. But, apart from those problems, this is a book I like for its central characters and deeply human and accurately observed relationships as well as its well-paced thriller elements.
My thanks to PenguinRandomHouse and NetGalley for an advance review copy of Dissolution for this review, which reflects solely my own opinions.
Interesting review. How do you feel it holds up after Ascension? I found that great bit very flawed (the gribbly monsters were more action movie than cosmic horror and the ‘I am alien’ twist very disappointing. Enough to consider avoiding Binge in future!