The Memory Police is a haunting book. I enjoyed it, and yet I don't feel I have a lot to say about it. (Which, in itself, feels like a sort of reflection of the book.) The narrator is a novelist, living alone in the house she grew up in after the long-ago death of her parents. She lives on an unnamed island where things entire concepts and categories of things – disappear with some regularity. Most people move on and forget immediately; at the moment an item is disappeared, they are instantly cut off from it – they no longer relate to the item it once was. But a few people remember, and those people are the targets of the Memory Police. The narrator is a regular person, who forgets, but her mother remembered. This is perhaps what gives her added sympathy for the people who remember and leads to her decision to protect and hide her editor, another rememberer. It's hard, as a reader, to bear with her as she goes about complacently accepting each new disappearance; in this, we relate to the editor, who can't fathom the extent to which the loss is meaningless for those who don't remember. He tries and tries to re-stir memories in her. Now and then they do come back in the tiniest flickers.
The book really does leave you wondering who is worse off: the narrator who forgets, and only feels a vague emptiness or deadening, or the editor, who remembers everything, but must live hidden away, forever outside the world for his own safety.
