Memory, by Margaret Mahy

There are Margaret Mahy novels and stories I've read over and over again, but they must amount to well under half what she wrote. I've never read her systematically; this book's been untouched on my shelf for years. It's the first of her books I've read as an adult which I didn't read as a child, and it feels strange by virtue of that, full of half-echoes, but not the remembered kind. Someone who imagines herself marked with images of moons; a young man is most himself while tap-dancing; wildness as dangerous, entangled with desire, imagined as a world thronged with pathways to follow; I've read all those things in her books before. But I don't expect the young man to get drunk. I don't expect him to wander through a city late at night. He, Jonny, sets out to find the only person who can help him satisfy himself about the details of his sister's death, the memory of which he thinks he may have partly invented; finds instead, by discontinuous chance, an old woman named Sophie who mistakes him for someone long gone, and whose Alzheimers makes her solitary life a sparking cascade of habits and old memories, very much herself and yet not her old self in the way she will offer biscuits to guests every five minutes, and bustle about the kitchen doing precisely nothing, remembering what busting is supposed to feel like but not its content. Jonny's care for her is difficult and necessary, but she is always a person, not an object of pity only. And it begins to look as though she's going to give him the direction he desperately needs, but this isn't a book which rounds things off; it begins with untenable situations which are negative, and ends with untenable situations which are positive and look like leading somewhere.

The book is beautifully shaped around memory and mismemory of all kinds: beloved memories that harm and fool, true memories returned to or made false by the speaking of them, memories on the tip of the tongue.