How often do you listen to that little voice in your head? Yes, that one, the one that can often be impossible to silence, especially when we are weighing our options in contentious or challenging circumstances. One of the most interesting aspects of our "little voice" is its capacity to push us to act or move in ways that are not aligned or maybe even totally parallel to our "normal" selves. It can be the dark side to our much lighter selves, or even the brighter side to our darker selves, but the most daunting factor about it is its capacity to keep hammering on at us, even (or especially) in the silence of night.
We all seem to have different levels of chatterboxes inside our heads, in that some people barely notice it while others have it rattling on all the time, but the point is - we all seem to have one. How many of us can honestly say that we never talk to ourselves? When we physically talk to ourselves are we actually talking back to that little voice? Do we actually need to discuss ourselves with the inner voice and seek approval, or are we often dueling with that voice and telling it to be quiet, because we are going to do this or that, or say this or that?
We all seem to have different levels of chatterboxes inside our heads, in that some people barely notice it while others have it rattling on all the time, but the point is - we all seem to have one. How many of us can honestly say that we never talk to ourselves? When we physically talk to ourselves are we actually talking back to that little voice? Do we actually need to discuss ourselves with the inner voice and seek approval, or are we often dueling with that voice and telling it to be quiet, because we are going to do this or that, or say this or that?
The more intriguing question is, of course, where does this duality come from? Dueling with our duality is not an uncommon phenomenon in humanoids, and it's a very confounding experience. With an outside world full of rivalry, competition and even conflict, what could possibly make us fight with ourselves? Well, Penguin Canada seem to find such questions of interest also and one of their new authors, MD Waters , seems to have some of the answers - maybe!
In her hot debut novel, ARCHETYPE , we get introduced to Emma, an accident victim who wakes with the equivalent of a neural scrape, with no apparent memory or even identity remaining, leaving the repainting of the blank canvas to her husband Declan; he has to colour in the vague outline of an empty shell of a life that is the new Emma. As much as the newly reframed image appears to take shape and makes sense, there is a nagging inner voice that haunts Emma, and she begins to have nightmarish flashbacks that question the story of her life as laid down by Declan. She begins to hear commentary by "Her": it's an inner voice that seems to know, and thus begins a war of words between Declan and she-who-will-not-be-silenced.
It's a very interesting premise (even if the waking as an empty shell is not entirely novel) and none of us can imagine how shocking it would be to wake and have our previous identity removed from our brain, then being force-fed some version of our story that might be both comforting and contradictory at the same time. But Emma allows herself to become intertwined into Declan and their purported shared life and love, yet is also drawn to the handsome Noah who becomes her lover. "Her" seems to trust Noah more, which is a source of torment for Emma, because she too cannot dismiss him and commit exclusively to her "new" husband Declan. She truly becomes torn between two lovers in a fashion that underlines the concept of simultaneously being two related individuals at one and the same time.
MD Waters weaves a scientifically futuristic landscape where fertile women are a hot commodity of increased value in a society where men greatly outnumber women, and where East and West are in conflict in North America. Women in the West are free but those in the East have more in common with a new form of slavery, being trained for becoming wives and mothers. It might be viewed as a contemporary version of those Stepford Wives, perhaps, or maybe it's the final chapter in that age old struggle for dominance/equivalence between men and women. It's not so much a brave new world as a bleak new world, and we don't learn much about how we got there, but that's not the point, right?!
Although I found the story a little slow to break into, and the characters remained charcoal sketches rather than full blown colour pictures, that may have been the point! The story is being told from the one with the blank slate for a life, so in a sense it is entirely natural that we may occasionally feel as lost as she did. We get more time to begin to figure things out for ourselves, or so we think, until MD Waters hits us from behind with shocker unexpected twists and turns. While I had some trouble developing empathy for Emma as a character, it is accurate to state that Emma herself didn't know who she was, so then how could we? One has to go on her journey with her, buy into it, give into it, and like she, try to make some sense of it all and figure our her truth.
The story is rather unusually told in first person narrative, but that can work well in certain cases such as "The Wasp Factory" by Iain Banks, or Barbara Kingsolver's "Poison Wood Bible", or even A QUIET RESIGNATION , by our very own Kevin Mc! It's not often that a book makes me think in such detail about what lies within, and how it got there, and where do our other voices, images and dreams truly arise from; while some choose reincarnation as their theme, MD Waters explores a more science-based origin for our duality, and as scientists here at EU, well, we just love her take on things!
We won't give away the punchline by going into too much detail about Emma's origins, but like life itself, it's all in the DNA! Who knows if we are already in some kind of future dystopia and we are "born" sharing our DNA sequence with another entity that remains part and parcel of us - able to communicate with us by being intimately intertwined with and wound into us via the sacred double helix that we share? Actually, it is the unwinding of that intertwined DNA and the separation of selves encoded therein that is a fundamental in the story of Emma Burke - that is the journey we go on with her.
In her first novel (of a two book series), MD Waters manages to create something very stimulating out of an initially blank canvas (Emma), and that is quite appropriate for someone who began her own journey on Archetype with a blank page and a keyboard in front of her! I am pretty certain that many other readers will already be similarly hooked and waiting anxiously for the 2014 follow-up prequel, PROTOTYPE - is it just my own wild imagination or are more and more women in town sporting luckenbooths on their left hands, in some form of alliance with Emma?!
Let's hope that Penguin doesn't make us wait too much longer to find out more! Okay, that's it for this one, and let me say that it's been a pleasure for EU to have been a part of the PENGUIN CANADA blog tour for ARCHETYPE - we really enjoyed the opportunity! By way of thanks to MD Waters herself, well, we will close it out with a request to her publisher using a line said by a certain Evelyn to DJ Dave Garver, in Carmel-by-the-Sea, Monterey - "Play Misty for me...."
Kevin Mc + Cristina Ciurli = EU ;)
Kevin Mc + Cristina Ciurli = EU ;)
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