BEFORE I GO TO SLEEP
By S.J. Watson
363 pages
Available at National Book Store
Christine, age 49, is staring across a restaurant, watching an infant being spoon-fed. She’s sitting with her husband, whose name she will forget by tomorrow, and she has this realization: We are the same, she wants to tell the infant. I need to be spoon-fed, too.
Spoon-feeding is how the reader receives Before I Go to Sleep, S.J. Watson’s debut bestseller novel, about a woman with amnesia who collects fresh experiences every day but forgets them after every night’s sleep. The novel is so obviously designed to deliver a shocking revelation by the end, that we are only given tiny morsels of information along the way about Christine’s reality, which involves — as mentioned — waking up, having forgotten her whole life, every single day. It’s quite a lot like Memento, the Christopher Nolan flick in which amnesiac Leonard tries to trace what led to his injury by tattooing his body with a succession of clues. Like Leonard, Christine suffers neurological damage, and attempts to lay down a memory trail by keeping a journal. So it’s like that, mixed maybe with the Drew Barrymore/Adam Sandler flick 50 First Dates (in which Sandler has to woo an amnesiac woman over and over again, every single day).
Christine recites the story in first person, and has to keep asking herself, Did I really experience something and write it down, or did I just imagine it and write it down? It’s a real tedious way to get through life, and Christine is routinely shocked to find that, when she awakens, she is not the 27-year-old she was when she suffered the head injury, but a 49-year-old woman who will be played by Nicole Kidman in the upcoming movie version. This happens about a dozen times in the book.
She’s cared for by a man she calls Ben, who has to keep reminding her every morning that he’s her husband. He treats Christine with a cautious over-solicitousness, occasionally withholding information, such as the fact that she had a son, and that she once wrote a novel, before her head injury made crafting plotlines a little tricky.
Author Watson does manage to get inside the head of Christine. What emerges is a woman haunted by what her life is — a shell, with no way to fill it. She can’t give herself fully to love the man she calls her husband, because she has nothing — no memories — to build that love upon. She can’t give meaning to her own life, because few memories exist to hold it together.
Hence the journal. In most fictions of this type, the main character gets better day after day, despite endless setbacks. Think Groundhog Day, or Tom Cruise dying over and over again in The Edge of Tomorrow. Christine relies on her journal to give shape to a shapeless life. She needs to write to prove she exists, to remember and tell her story. In its more poetic moments, Watson’s novel taps into the ineffable nature of memory, how fragile our experiences really are without it.
But mostly it’s a potboiler, swept up in Christine’s endless confusion over who she is, what’s true and what’s not. Her journal tells her who not to trust from the very first page. As a thriller, though, I found it lacked propulsion — it’s hard to give a story much momentum when the main “action” involves a character remembering to write stuff down before she loses it.
To keep Christine — and us — a little more confused, there’s a certain Dr. Nash who has treated her in the past and helpfully calls every morning to remind Christine to dig out her hidden journal and write down the day’s events. She’s also got a helpful woman friend named Claire, someone she used to party and raise hell with before marrying, but as with most free-spirited, liberal gal friends in this type of fiction, you don’t want to trust her too much around your husband.
Watson’s book was written under the careful cultivation of the Faber Academy Write A Novel program, and this book, with all its cookie-cutter corners neatly trimmed, is the happy result. Voila: bestseller, movie starring Kidman, Colin Firth and Mark Strong. At its center is a struggling female character, one not so much seeking Emma Watson’s equality or feminism as a simple shot at putting her own puzzle pieces together. But preventing this breakthrough is a shapeless — until the end — male presence in her life, effectively slipping her a Roofie every day to keep those memories well at bay. We do admire Christine in her attempts to gain clarity, line by line, every day through her journal, but as a reader, it feels a little like patiently awarding an infant for taking baby steps, over and over again, until you just wanna say pick up those feet and start cruising already.