You Only Live Once. That's what people said, as if life really mattered because it happened only one time. But what if it was the other way around? What if what you did mattered MORE because life happened again and again, consequences unfolding across centuries and continents? What if you had chances upon chances to love the people you loved, to fix what you screwed up, to get it right?The Forgetting Time isn't capital-L “Literature”, but it is a compelling read that has something to say. Its plot works, its structure works, and it's populated with interesting, believable characters. This isn't a book that changed my life, but I can certainly recommend it as an entertaining read. I'd rate it 3.5 stars and am rounding up to rank it against other pop fiction. I went into this cold – had no clue what the book would be about – and that worked for me, so while I won't put in any real spoilers, other cold readers might not want to hazard what mild spoilers may lay beyond this point.
She had heard stories of mothers who had worked tirelessly and reversed many of the symptoms of autism in their children; mothers who learned how to build ramps for their disabled daughters; who taught themselves sign language to reach their deaf sons. But when did you stop, when it was your child? She knew the answer already. There was no stopping.The Forgetting Time is told primarily from two points-of-view: Janie is a single mother whose four-year-old son, Noah, has the same terrifying nightmare every night, and when she goes into his bedroom to comfort him, Noah always wails for his “real mother” and screams that he wants to go home. His every day behaviour is so unsettling and uncanny that the director of his nursery school – where the boy frightens the other children with his precocious knowledge of both death and pop culture – insists that Noah be taken to a therapist to avoid a call to Social Services.
If consciousness survived death – and he had shown that it did – then how did this connect with what Max Planck and the quantum physicists realized: that events didn't occur unless they were observed, and therefore that consciousness was fundamental, and matter itself was derived from it? Did that therefore make this world like a dream, with each life, like each dream, flowing one after the other? And was it then possible that some of us – like these children – were awakened too abruptly from these dreams, and ached to return to them?Janie and Noah's story is intermixed with that of Dr Jerome Anderson: an aging psychiatrist who devoted his career to investigating global stories of children who remembered previous lives. There's nothing New Agey about Anderson: he had spent decades compiling concrete evidence and hopes that his lasting legacy will be that of a pioneering scientist. While Janie and Anderson both need something from each other – a cure for Noah, one last solid case – they're each holding a secret back from the other that adds some nice irony for the reader.
Author Sharon Gaskin doesn't drive the narrative straight from A to B, there are turns along the way, and she also doesn't have people reacting quite the way you might expect – both of which increase the credibility of the story (she also quotes passages from Life Before Life by Dr Jim Tucker, a real life Anderson, and these stories of children who remember their previous lives also add veracity). Gaskin also uses some literary devices to varying success: I liked the juxtaposition of Noah remembering too much at the beginning of his life and Anderson, who is suffering from progressive aphasia, beginning to forget too much in his twilight years. On the other hand, having several characters reminding themselves to breathe throughout the book, followed by an asthma attack at the climax (breathe, breathe) felt too deliberate (as did Anderson musing a couple of times about Herclitus' statement that you can't enter the same river twice, and then discovering that Anderson is haunted by an incident of someone who literally entered the same river twice). Some new points-of-view are added in the second half of the book, and these were the only sections that affected me emotionally.
But surely we all carried some little piece of each other inside of us. So what did it matter, whether the memories belonging to her boy existed inside this other one? Why were we all hoarding love, stockpiling it, when it was all around us, moving in and out of us like the air, if only we could feel it?Ultimately, this was a fine read – something light without being mindless – and I'm happy to have picked it up.
