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Initially, the most surprising thing about S J Watson’s debut novel is exactly that: it is a debut that suggests a much more experienced and practised source. Before I Go to Sleep is the fruit born of Watson’s entrance into the very first Faber Academy ‘Writing a Novel’ course in 2009 and, on top of it being an immediate triumph, is a great deviation from his previous occupation as an employee of the NHS, although, as might be expected, the subject is not.
The novel follows the fragile progress of middle-aged Christine who, around twenty years ago, was the victim of a trauma that resulted in a rare form of amnesia and now prevents her from forming any new memories. As a result, she awakes every morning with no memory of the previous day and no understanding of where she is or how she got there; her mind is perpetually embedded in her twenty-something self with initially no recollection of the intervening years and each day she must learn where she lives, about her condition and its apparent genesis in a car accident, about her husband whom she wakes up next to, and about whether or not she has children. The reader, however, is made privy to her attempts at keeping a diary (constructed with the secret help of her doctor Ed Nash) in order to regain what she has lost and to try to piece together the hazy shards of a life which she can’t remember living.
The result is a wonderful and frightening narrative in which one is stranded trying to discern the shady figures on the periphery of her mind who refuse to come into focus or reveal their true role in her past. But finding memories isn’t Christine’s only problem; she is also caught between numerous people, each with their own version of events or each with their reasons for not revealing the whole picture, throwing the narrative reliability into a disarray that fluctuates between epiphany and crippling self-doubt.
Watson handles the narrative sensitively, particularly as an attempt at realism with Christine’s condition could have made the novel heavy with arduous and dull repetition in the hands of a less capable writer. Instead, the strain of the condition is portrayed carefully and Watson manages the logistics that this main character forces on a writer while maintaining a constant pitch of suspense. Undoubtedly this is the novel’s strongest aspect; the daily recording of events by the ex-novelist Christine is almost playfully self-referential, but the managing of the form is nothing short of literary mastery.
Its frequent twists and unrelenting suspense make it ripe material for production in film; the plot comes from similar stock as that of the 2000 film Memento as well as, so I’m told, 50 First Dates, although the tone of the novel differs greatly from both with its grounding in a contemporary North London domestic setting. Unsurprisingly, the rights to the film have already been bought up by Ridley Scott’s production company Scott Free and Rowan Joffe, the writer and director of the 2010 adaptation of Brighton Rock, is set to direct.
How the material is treated remains to be seen, but what is clear is that the original is a rich source of suspicion and creeping, infectious anxiety that is stiflingly claustrophobic in both its dislocated heroine and its lonely domesticity. It’s a frightening and compulsive read that will leave you grappling and grasping hold of your own memories with both hands.
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