Maybe it is a yen to go back to simpler times but time travel books seem to be making a comeback at the moment. Recent examples include Kaliane Bradley’s hit The Ministry of Time, before that was Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone’s How You Lose the Time War and Analee Newitz’s The Future of Another Timeline. Nicholas Binge’s new novel Dissolution does not at first seem like a time travel book – its focus is on memory and memory loss. But when it turns out that memory can be used as an anchor to take people to an actual time and place – readers’ minds will start to be blown.
Dissolution starts, and much of it is delivered, as a dialogue and a countdown clock. 83 year-old Maggie is in the bottom of an empty swimming pool, hooked up to an IV drip and being questioned by a man called Hassan. Hassan wants to know everything that has happened to her since they first met, seemingly unaware of any of it even though he was there. He has given her a drug that helps her to access her memories of the events sequentially. That story starts with Hassan approaching Maggie and convincing her to “rescue” her husband Stanley from an old age home, Hassan claims the home is actually a front for an organisation that is stealing Stanley’s memories. Maggie does not trust Hassan but goes along with him, particularly when his own technology, a machine called the Memory Spade, allows her to revisit the memories of the two of them that Stanley is losing.
Interspersed with this narrative is the story of Stanley himself. Who as a teen got himself a scholarship to a posh school only to find himself on the outer. Stanley is brought into a select group of misfit students by Professor Waldman who trains them in improving their memory. The professor’s belief is that by unlocking memory, they can in turn unlock the true power of the mind and make people “more human”.
This is all before the time travel shenanigans kick in. Because it turns out if you can calibrate two people’s memories to the same moment in time through the memory spade they can go back to that point in time. But something is lurking, an intangible, unstoppable universal check on this sort of thing that wipes people from reality. And Maggie is literally running out of time to stop it.
Dissolution is a high-paced, high-concept thriller that is securely anchored around a really engaging protagonist. Octogenarian Maggie takes being an action hero in her stride – mucking through memories, jumping out of windows, playing a deep game against her adversaries – but who also demonstrates deep love for her husband and her estranged daughter. With echoes of less intense time-travel books like The Time Travellers Wife, Dissolution bases itself around a relationship that seems to transcend time.
As with many time travel stories, the plot is riddled with bootstrap paradoxes (as in: you will come to me at this time in the past and tell me this important piece of information, or: I did this thing which you told me to do which you only knew about because you learned out about it in the future). But Dissolution barrels along at a fast enough pace and with enough verve to make it work. And Binge does his best to make sure that all of his timey-wimey bits line up and all of the loops are closed. Binge does try to say things about the concept of “deep time”, and the power (and to some extent sanctity?) of memory, but it is always better when the action pushes the philosophy aside.
Overall, Dissolution is a fun, mind bending, techno-thriller powered by the conflict between a delightful protagonist and the moustache-twirling villain who underestimates her.
Dissolution by Nicholas Binge
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