Awake Awake by Fiona Mozley review – in pursuit of false memories

From the Booker-shortlisted author, a tantalisingly unreliable account of childhood, history and mental uncertainty

The historian and novelist Fiona Mozley acknowledged in a 2018 piece for the Guardian that the city of York had a major influence on both her careers. Childhood and adolescence in a place such as York, full of time and times, can generate conflict between “the desire to live in the past and the need to extract oneself from it”. Awake Awake, a follow-up to her previous novels, 2017’s Booker-shortlisted Elmet and 2021’s Hot Stew, engages with two types of memory: the personal and the historical. They’re not exactly at odds, but as far as living in the past is concerned they feed on one another in a complex, entangled relationship.

Narrator Mary Mooney – also a novelist, also from York, and whose first book is also shortlisted for a major prize – tells the story of her mental illness. Or she seems to. She begins in childhood. We’re introduced to her parents and her parents’ friends, religious academics in York; to her home in Cathedral Close; to school and her school friends, with whom she will stay in contact as she grows up. Life is a round of family occasions, church events and church politics, spiced with adventure and wild excitement in the countryside, mischief in the classroom. Detail is piled on detail and presented with photographic clarity, from her father, with his “large, pointed nose and grey eyes that looked greener than usual when he was outside in the vegetable patch”, to the fall of the Twin Towers, which she recalls seeing “on a television in the school staff room … looking through the door from the outside and glimpsing it on the tiny screen”.
Continue reading...