![Our Memory Like Dust by [Chait, Gavin]](https://images-fe.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/61GYjfEgkSL._SY346_.jpg)
Our memory is like dust: imperfect, fragile, ephemeral, fragmented, and Gavin Chait’s novel Our Memory Like Dust perfectly captures what it means to remember, how it feels to remember, and why, in times of crisis, it’s imperative to remember if we’re never to repeat the crimes of our collective pasts. Crises of all kinds, from the environmental to the humanitarian, are also like dust: a moment ruptures, the fragments fly, they fall for a long time, drifting through the light-shafts of human consciousness, until they fall into place in history, and we live in an era exploding with them.
Chait captures the dust-like drift of crisis and memory in writing moving with poetry and precision, and it’s never felt more prescient. Set decades into an unflinchingly familiar future, it follows those fleeing, fighting, and desperate to find refuge from an Africa devastated by conflict, but this is a novel as diverse as the continent itself: it’s sci-fi, dystopian, and speculative, but from the opening epigraphs, it’s also frighteningly familiar and uncomfortably current. Much of the action moves with a migration crisis, but Chait approaches it from a mythologising perspective: a weaving of voices, mother-tongues and folktales that elevate it from a war-torn drama to a interwoven mix of the mythic and the modern. There’s something modernist, almost Eliot’s The Waste Land-like in the devastated, dusty landscaping of the Sahara desert, and, like The Waste Land, ‘out of the dead land’ sprouts ‘memory and desire’.
Debris floats for a long time before it falls into place, and the fragmented opening infused with temporal shifts is, at times, frustrating, but through it Chait has captured the fragmentation, the imperfection, of memories: they fall apart before they fuse together into a picture man can understand; Our Memory Like Dust suggests that stories and crises do the same. Chait manages to craft a temporal setting that seems both modern – with its technologies and timely relation to the ‘real world’ – and mythological, with storytelling that seeps out of its history and into the story at hand; the effect is wholly human, reading the novel is what it feels like in the moment of remembering, and it’s no mean feat.
In a discussion of his creative influences, Chait references Akram Khan, a contemporary choreographer who does his own mixing with mythology and the migrant crisis: in a commission for English National Ballet, Khan reimagines the classically canonised Romantic ballet Giselle against the migrant crisis, and uses echoes of music and movement from the mythic echelons of the original in his creation. Our Memory Like Dust shares those echoes of classicism and mythology, but, like Khan, deconstructs it and creates something more harrowing – and more human – out of the dust. For, as Our Memory Like Dust demonstrates, not only is memory imperfect, fragile, ephemeral and fragmented, but so is humanity. Like dust.
Review
"Proves that the best science fiction can be not only socially relevant and thought-provoking, but entertaining . . . a brilliantly reimagined near-future Africa . . . he interweaves ecological and political intrigue with Senegalese folk myths to tell the ultimately uplifting story of a continent sadly neglected in SF." (Eric Brown GUARDIAN)
"Uncannily in tune with the time it was written . . . at once dreamlike and harrowingly believable, this is not a comforting read. It is, however, a gripping and frightening one." (SFX magazine)
"A multi-layered narrative that builds momentum and depth and inexorably draws the reader in . . . there is a dignity to this book, a quiet power and charm that breathes life into its pages . . . this is a book of prophetic realism, determined optimism and magical storytelling that sets it apart." (SFCROWSNEST)
"Timely and intelligent . . . blends magic realism and action to poetic and thrilling ends . . . it's packed full of fun, danger, stolen moments and hypocrisy - much like the modern world." (SCiFiNOW)
"As speculative fiction it is completely on the money . . . an important commentary on present-day headlines and a prescient warning of what we can expect if our ways do not change . . . highly readable . . . Chait is a very good writer, juggling several emotionally powerful concepts with the timeless magic of aural storytelling." (STARBURST magazine)
"Uncannily in tune with the time it was written . . . at once dreamlike and harrowingly believable, this is not a comforting read. It is, however, a gripping and frightening one." (SFX magazine)
"A multi-layered narrative that builds momentum and depth and inexorably draws the reader in . . . there is a dignity to this book, a quiet power and charm that breathes life into its pages . . . this is a book of prophetic realism, determined optimism and magical storytelling that sets it apart." (SFCROWSNEST)
"Timely and intelligent . . . blends magic realism and action to poetic and thrilling ends . . . it's packed full of fun, danger, stolen moments and hypocrisy - much like the modern world." (SCiFiNOW)
"As speculative fiction it is completely on the money . . . an important commentary on present-day headlines and a prescient warning of what we can expect if our ways do not change . . . highly readable . . . Chait is a very good writer, juggling several emotionally powerful concepts with the timeless magic of aural storytelling." (STARBURST magazine)
Book Description
Resonating with today's headlines, the author of the acclaimed Lament for the Fallen looks to a future at once tainted with despair but buoyed up by hope in his second, extraordinary novel - a must-read for fans of Lauren Beukes and Nnedi Okorafor as much as David Mitchell, Michel Faber and Emily St John Mandel.