Never Never

In Never Never, soul mates Charlie and Silas lose their memories every 48 hours. As they come to understand the reality of their situation, their entrapment in multiple loops, they begin to leave notes for themselves and each other to better retain their memories. In this, the novel uses a plot device featured in (and arguably popularized by) movies such as romantic comedy Groundhog Day (1993) and murder mystery Memento (2000).

Before the rise of theoretical work in the neurosciences in the late 1980s and before the publication of Stephen Hawking’s bestseller A Brief History of Time in 1988, the depiction of amnesia in novels and other media was often seen as artificial, a way to force exposition. Amnesia was often associated with hospital melodrama and mystery thrillers, rather than being recognized as a scientific phenomenon. With new interest in the brain and theoretical physics (specifically, the possibility of multiverses) in the late 20th century, amnesia has emerged among writers not as a medical condition or clumsy plot device, but a metaphor for exploring memory and identity. In this way, amnesia introduced a new strategy for exploring unreliable narration. In novels such as Richard Powers’s National Book Award-winning The Echo Maker (2006), Julian Barnes’s Booker Prize-winning The Sense of an Ending (2011), and Nobel Prize-winning writer Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Buried Giant (2015), amnesia suggests a complex interplay between fact and fiction, material and intellectual, as memories prove both intimate and unreliable.