The Memory Box
One has to be very old these days to remember a wartime romance, which is why The Memory Box begins with the narrator’s 100th birthday. As you would expect, she has ‘unfinished business’ and needs to revisit the scenes of her youth—in this case Italy—to find closure.
The story is structured in the familiar two time-streams. The historic stream covers the narrator’s experiences as an evacuee on a Welsh farm and then as the English wife of an Italian partisan fighter in German-occupied Italy. It is an unusual love story, well imagined, dramatic and sometimes violent, which ends with a twist that upends the story. In contrast the contemporary time stream, which is given roughly equal space, and which centres on the narrator’s young carer and her difficult relationship with her boyfriend, is pallid and lifeless. The historic stream includes a massacre and several violent deaths; the contemporary stream is mainly about squabbles over the housekeeping money. The narrator has to tell the story to somebody, but the listener’s story should not be a distraction from the main narrative.
An interesting variation on the two-stream reminiscence novel.
