Imagine that you gain access to a device that allows you to revisit, via video, every moment of your life, good and bad, transformative and mundane. A device that allows you to return to past experiences with living or dead loved ones: both treasured encounters and those so painful it might be best to erase them from your mind. Would such technology be a gift or something more damaging than rewarding?
This question lies at the heart of Michael Paul Kozlowsky’s engrossing and inventive novel, in which the main character, Sean Whittlesea, wins such a device in an unsettling corporate competition. (More on that soon.) The technology brings Sean back to some of his happiest moments, such as when he met his beloved wife, Gwen. But it also draws him closer to darker moments, the worst of these being Gwen’s murder, which he witnessed but forgot: seemingly the result of retrograde amnesia, due to a blow to the head he received during the incident. Understandably, Sean dreads returning to the scene of the crime, even though this promises to reveal exactly what happened, and who was responsible for Gwen’s death.
The past-revealing technology, dubbed the Memory Palace, is essentially a box that offers two connections: one to a television, the other to the user’s temples, via two wires. Once the connections are in place, scenes from the user’s past play out on the TV in no predictable order. The source of the Memory Palace: Archibald Ulger, who runs the company where Sean works. Like Sean, Ulger is a widower, and he’s established a Widowers’ Club for male employees who have lost their spouses. (Eventually, the reason for Ulger’s special interest in widowers becomes clear, and it’s deeply disturbing.)
Sean wins the Memory Palace in one of the competitions that Ulger holds for club members. To win, contenders must be willing to put themselves, and sometimes others, in mortal danger. Sean and the other widowers are willing to accept this risk because the prizes that the winners receive transform them, in Sean’s words, into “living legends. … [T]hey accelerated through the company seemingly overnight, accumulating their millions, jet-setting the world, their meager pasts forgotten. They were the envy of us all.”
For his part, Ulger talks up the competitions and prizes with cult-leader-style charisma, saying this before one of the contests: “I offer you a way out, a new life!” Yet it eventually becomes clear that like the typical cult leader, Ulger is largely about amassing power and control. And when his true agenda for the Widowers’ Club, the competitions, and the prizes is revealed, it makes real-world stories of corporate overreach and C-suite psychopathy feel pretty tame by comparison.
But in the early going, Ulger seems to be pulling for members of the Widows’ Club, or at least for those who’ve won prizes. When Sean wins the Memory Palace, Ulger tells him that it will allow him to view a play-by-play record of his past, which will be superior to the flawed memories that Sean has constructed:
He promises the same life-changing enlightenment to Sean. And in his early days with the Memory Palace, it truly seems like a gift to Sean. He’s able to return to a happy time in his childhood when his father read to him, and he finds himself revisiting his first encounter with Gwen: a transformative moment in his life. Also, his times with the Memory Palace give Sean a welcome respite from his troubled present. He and his fiancee, Hayley, seem to be growing apart, and Hayley is concerned that Sean is still too attached to the memory of Gwen. Also, Hayley hasn’t been able to connect with Sean and Gwen’s teenaged son, Nick, who seems to have retreated into his own world, a world that Sean has been barred from as well.
In time, the Memory Palace itself poses problems for Sean. For one thing, it puts an even greater distance between him and Hayley, and also Nick, as Sean spends more and more time retreating into, and reexamining, his past. For another, although the device is purportedly replaying a moment-by-moment record of Sean’s past, this record doesn’t always square with Sean’s memories. He’s left to wonder whether his mind has reshaped past experiences, as often happens when we form and revisit memories, or whether something darker is afoot–especially when replayed moments just don’t feel true or possible to him. Is the device, perhaps via Ulger, manipulating Sean by altering the record of his past? If so, why? If not, is Sean just unwilling to accept that his memory misrepresents the facts? These questions become especially pressing when the Memory Palace seems to uncover troubling truths (or are they fabrications?) about Gwen’s murder, threatening Sean’s presumptions about what happened and his very sense of self.
As it follows Sean’s efforts to make sense of his past, and his present, Scarecrow Has a Gun entertains on multiple levels. It’s a mind-bending mystery, as Sean seeks the truth about his wife’s murder yet finds himself immersed in more uncertainty. It’s a horror-show-worthy take on corporate villainy. Above all, it’s an unforgettable exploration of the power and limitations of memory, and of how rarely it tells the full truth.
I should say that the novel encouraged me to contemplate the imperfections in my own memories, and to consider how (and why) I might be driven to reshape my perceptions of certain past events, and of myself. No doubt, many other readers will have the same reaction, and will feel as haunted by the novel as I’ve felt. Kozlowsky has crafted a profound and captivating book.
Would My Pick be Your Pick?
If you're interested in ________, the answer may be "Yes":￭ Science fiction and fantasy
￭ Mysteries
￭ The plasticity and shortcomings of memories
￭ Stories that explore grief and how we try to come to terms with it
