Review: Remember Me

Napier-based Charity Norman is one of our best kept literary secrets. Her last book, 2020’s London-set The Secrets of Strangers, was that rare thing: an emotionally involving siege thriller; and a finalist in last year’s Ngaio Marsh Awards for crime writing.

Remember Me returns to a New Zealand setting and weaves a riveting tale of betrayal, love and deception centered around the disappearance, 25 years ago, of a vibrant young woman, Leah, who walked into the Ruahine Ranges, ostensibly to study snails, and never returned.

That disappearance has left an indelible mark on her tight-knit community and when Emily, a friend of Leah’s and now a children’s book illustrator in London, gets a call informing her of her father’s Alzheimer’s diagnosis, she begrudgingly returns to Aotearoa, planning to stay just a few weeks. The diagnosis is news to Emily who rarely keeps in touch with her distant and cold father — a doctor who is revered in the community but a father who is stingy with his affection at home: “He behaved as though his family were characters on the telly, and he wasn’t even watching the show. He wasn’t abusive; he was simply absent.”

His wife left him as soon as the children were grown, returned to England and remarried. All three of his children carry scars from their privileged but emotionally difficult upbringing. Emily still has flashbacks to an incident involving her brother and sister as kids, when she was pushed out of a tree — an accident brushed off by the family as kids’ play — and she has never forgiven her father for missing her university graduation.

Norman is great at capturing the simmering tensions in a family and how they fester over time; Remember Me will strike a chord with the “sandwich generation” — boomers stuck between kids and caring for ageing parents. We’re with Emily every step of the way as she tends to her increasingly confused father, deals with her two difficult siblings (who are more concerned with a possible inheritance than their father’s well-being) and reconnects with Leah’s brother, who has never recovered from the loss of his sister.

Despite the bouts of confusion and anger, brought on by the worsening dementia, Emily begins to get to know her father and, for the first time, gets a peek into some of the reasons behind his aloof demeanour and why he didn’t make that graduation. There are also moments of lucidity when the father she remembers returns: organised, smart and inscrutable.

But this is a suspense novel and Norman builds that narrative with similar precision, introducing us to an array of characters with possible motives without them seeming like authorial pawns. Reading Remember Me, I was reminded of Australian novelist Jane Harper who is another superb thriller writer similarly adept at writing layered, atmospheric and character-first mysteries, often set in a menacing landscape.

The added pleasure of reading Norman lies in the humanity she packs into her novels; there are no false notes, no sentimentality (although this might have some reader’s reaching for the tissues), just an incisive look into what makes humans tick. The result is a wonderful and heartbreaking novel that will stay with readers long after the final page is turned. Highly recommended.

 Reviewed by Greg Fleming