Otherworldly family tale
It has been almost fifteen years since Christy Ann Conlin’s startling debut novel Heave burst onto the CanLit scene, garnering critical raves and award nominations. Readers anticipating more of the same from her long-awaited second adult novel should adjust their expectations: The Memento is something altogether different. It’s something otherworldly. The Memento is a novel of the uncanny, drawing together a coming of age story with elements of ghost stories, haunted houses, family curses and folk tales.
It’s a dizzying feat, one which occasionally makes for difficult reading, but a novel which, as a whole, wields a strange power and force, both psychological and emotional.
Fancy Mosher lives in a world outside of time. While The Memento hints at being set in the 1950s, time is fluid in this area of the Fundy Shore. Fancy lives in the servants’ rooms at Petal’s End, a once-grand country home now being barely maintained by a minimal staff for rare visits from the Parker family.
Fancy is the twelfth child of Marilyn, who struggles with alcoholism and tragedy, and is estranged from her daughter.
The novel opens on Fancy’s birthday, with a surprising visit from Marilyn at Fancy’s school, and with a letter from Fancy’s beloved, deceased, grandfather. As “a twelfth-born Mosher,” the letter hints, Fancy may, having reached the age of12, become the possessor of the family’s “memento,” an ability to see or interact with the dead.
Just how this burden will manifest itself is unclear, and as the summer progresses and the Parkers return to Petal’s End one last time, Fancy will struggle with this new awareness, her burgeoning knowledge of the world, and the secrets which surround her, aware that “sometimes the dead do not come back to forgive.”
The Memento weaves a powerful spell, exploring that long-ago summer through the ragged, vernacular voice of an aged Fancy. There is a sudden shift into the last third of the book, which spans years and glosses over time and events in a manner at odds with the earlier pages. It’s initially jarring, but essential as the mysteries of the past are explored. The sharpened clarity and insight of those late pages don’t rob The Memento of its mystery, but deepen it. It’s a masterful accomplishment from a powerful writer. Robert Wiersema’s latest book is Black Feathers.