THE LAST THING I REMEMBER by Deborah Bee
This is a great debut by a writer with a very promising future ahead of her. Sarah is in a coma and her husband is dead. But who is responsible? Kelly is a tough thirteen-year-old schoolgirl and Sarah’s unlikely young friend, the young, rough-and-ready Kelly having been taken under Sarah’s wing.
It is told through alternating perspectives by these two very different characters – Sarah the caring middle-class coma patient and Kelly the spikey, tough-beyond-her-years working class schoolgirl. Kelly is a fantastic creation and outshines the nice-but-a-little-dull Sarah. Kelly swears – a lot. She is nobody’s fool and is a bit mean to her brother who has learning difficulties. This initially puts you off Kelly for the first few chapters but as the book goes on more of Kelly’s complex character is revealed. Crime literature is awash with spikey female characters these days – from Lisbeth Salander to cops like Jane Casey’s brilliant Maueve Kerrigan series – but to create such an interesting and entertaining protagonist this young is rarely seen outside of YA books and the author pulls it off perfectly. Her mum, with her innate dislike of the police, is also refreshingly realistic in what is a very stylish but wholly believable book.
Sarah’s character is a little straightforward compared to to Kelly but she is there mainly to invoke readers’ sympathy and to contrast with Kelly’s empowered teenager. She is very likeable and you are immediately on her side, willing her to recover from her coma where she narrates the whole of her side of the story, or what little of it she can remember.
The dual coma-patient-and-tough-schoolgirl narrative is original but works perfectly and is a new one on me. It effortlessly straddles that area between crime and mainstream/literary fiction and with its locked-in heroine and its exciting, profanity-littered multiple first person narrative structure, at times it put me in mind of Mark Billingham’s Sleepyhead and even the novels of the great Iain Banks. Yep, it really is that good, so good you can’t believe it’s a debut novel.
In fact, it’s almost impossible to find fault with this book. I had an advance kindle edition and the typescript was all over the place but even this didn’t affect my enjoyment of the book because the story was so gripping and involving – you simply HAVE to read on to find out what happens next. The only thing that occurs to me is that the male characters are very two-dimensional but this doesn’t spoil your enjoyment and there is so much happening plot-wise that it may have slowed the story down to elaborate too much anyway. But this is a very minor quibble in a book that is so perfectly written and constructed that it’s hard to imagine how it could possibly be improved upon. Even its length is perfect for the story and it doesn’t drown you in description, pad itself out with unnecessary introspective passages or outstay its welcome, unlike so many overblown crime novels by more well-known writers.
In short, The Last Thing I Remember is one the freshest, darkly funniest, suspenseful and entertaining books I’ve read this year and I cannot recommend it highly enough. I genuinely look forward to reading more from this author.
This book was provided by Netgalley in return for an honest review.
