About
Reviews
Search
Submit
Home

Mystery Books for Sale

[ Home ]
[ About | Reviews | Search | Submit ]


  

FATAL MEMORIES
by Vladimir Lange
Red Square Press, March 2005
432 pages
$23.95
ISBN: 0976039818


Buy in the UK | Buy in Canada

In Vladimir Lange's debut novel FATAL MEMORIES, genetics is destiny. Dr Anne Powell, an American of Russian extraction, has invented a creepy machine called the magneto-encephalograph, or MEG. Similar to an MRI, it is the Freudian psychoanalysts's dream toy: it collects, records, and can even destroy the information stored in the patient's subconscious mind, including dreams and memories.

Some of the MEG patients' memories, Anne soon discovers, derive not from their own personal experiences, but from those of their ancestors. Yes, we are dealing with race memory. And, in Lange's fiction-world, race memory is real. Anne wonders if her "Russian genes" made it easy for her to learn the Russian language. In case the reader doesn't get the greater implications of this, the sentence is italicised.

Later, we find out, from the mouths of the scientists and from their personal experience, that desire is based on ancestry. You desire the people your ancestors do. One of the stranger rules of the world of FATAL MEMORIES is that, after the bisexual character is zapped with the MEG, she experiences the desires of a male ancestor.

Aggression, too, can apparently be inherited. This proves particularly problematic, because Vissarion Yossifovitch Namordin, the Communist Party candidate standing for election, is a direct descendant of Stalin. Prone to homicidal tendencies, his exploits include the attempted murder of his own campaign manager. Hoping to cure Namordin's problem before he wins the election, his goons import the MEG, with Anne in tow. Can she prevent the recurrence of Russia's Stalinist past, or is the cycle fated to repeat itself indefinitely?

I must admit that I couldn't make myself care. FATAL MEMORIES needs a good final edit. In the prefatory pages, Lange provides a sketch of the MEG, and three epigraphs by scientists and science writers, all of which heavy-handedly endorse the driving precepts of his science fiction.

"Evolution, genetics, psychological experiences, and even smells can trigger romantic reactions to another person," claims Anastasia Toufexis, in Time Magazine. In the latter two, scientists affiliated with Loyola-Marymount University and the Pavlov Institute declare that "Love is our ancestors whispering in our ears," and, more simply, "we are what we were." Following that is an introduction called "technologies collide," which charts the development of the MEG with the dryness of a medical journal article.

Repetition is common, and often the recycled imagery is far from vivid to begin with. Attractive men in this book are always 'muscular' for example. At one point, Anne feels "a sickening tightness beginning to build in her pelvic area." Lange repeats this diagnosis less than one page later. Anne recalls "cowering in her bed" and feeling "a sickening cramp in her pelvic area." She is compared to "a fawn caught in the headlights of a speeding truck" -- hardly an original description of an ingenue paralysed by fear.

However, this is a first novel. I have every hope that Lange's next experiment with fiction-writing will overcome the problems that permeate his FATAL MEMORIES.

Reviewed by Rebecca Nesvet, April 2005

[ Top ]


QUICK SEARCH:

 

Contact: Yvonne Klein (ymk@reviewingtheevidence.com)


[ About | Reviews | Search | Submit ]
[ Home ]