Judith Sullivan is a financial journalist who lives in Leeds but hails from Baltimore. She is working on a crime series set in Paris.
A few pages into The Glass Woman, the reader could be forgiven for expecting a poor woman’s Before I go to Sleep. I did for a good 20 pages but soon realized this book is so much more than that very fine novel about a woman whose memories are erased every day.
The glass woman of the McIlroy’s novel is Iris Henderson, 35, a research scientist with technology company Sila. We first meet her in hospital where she is recouping from a mysterious surgical procedure. The creepy crawlies set in early as we experience with Iris the realization that an AI program called Ariel has been installed in her brain. Ariel, we and Iris are told, will banish the patient’s most traumatic memories and allow her to move forward unencumbered with the unpleasant recall. Iris is bewildered, as are we, and she wanders the halls of this much-too-sanitized clinic. Peeking into the room of fellow patient Teo, she learns she’s not as badly off as this hapless chap, a cypher, a blank who’d not be out of place in One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest.
Horror’s clammy fingers creep up the reader’s spine as Iris chats to Teo. Is she, too, destined to become weak and vague and dim? She frets about this, of course, knowing Ariel needs six weeks to integrate into her brain, a fine one, we are led to believe, as Iris is a neuroscientist.
A somewhat dodgy Doctor Nicholls assures her Ariel is a good fairy, who will free Iris’s pathways and rid her of destructive behaviour pattens. In addition, Nicholls says, she can leave the clinic as most of the six weeks will play out in the London home she shares with hubby Marcus, also a Sila employee (with the Orwellian remit of “corporate strategy and consumer experience”). The husband is introduced early on, one of those figures who appears evil or kind depending on perspective. His “don’t worry, dear”s suggest a macho and domineering stripe. Alternately, he comes across as genuinely concerned and keen to restore his wife to full health and help her overcome the mysterious ailment that landed her in hospital in the first place.
The Hendersons’ Notting Hill is not the jolly neighbourhood of a Richard Curtis film. Instead, it is cold and severe and full of cement. Marcus returns to work and Iris is stuck at home trying to make sense of her new Ariel-infused life. McIlroy punctuates the chapters with a ticking clock heading toward the 42-day mark, which adds suspense and urgency.
This is not a book to spoil with too many plot revelations too soon. Suffice it to say, the reader gets to know Iris as she gets to know herself and there are small reveals as well as one major one. Like the reader without the character’s back story, Irish is hamstrung by lack of recall. She and the reader nonetheless piece together the reasons for the Ariel implant and come to grips with Iris’ own responsibility as a guinea pig.
The Glass Woman is that too-rare a beast – an urgent thriller with solid intellectual underpinning. The questions abound. Would you accept to carry around a fancy microchip if it meant you could zap any risk of PTSD? Does technology have the capacity to modulate human emotion? Can a person whose memories have been artificially wiped function as a whole human being? Are we not, as humans, made up of our memory and memories as much as we are of blood and bone and flesh?
This is a smart person’s book written by a smart author. I look forward to McIlroy’s next foray into the recesses of the human brain – or whatever she takes her hand to.
Sea also
The Scientist and AI: A Cautionary Tale by ALICE MCILROY
