Isobel has her perfect job, working for Oakley Associates as a Heaven Architect. She sits with clients and literally creates their personal heavens with them so that when they die, their ‘souls’ will spend eternity in a perfect world where they can relive their favourite moments in life with those that they love.
The reality is that the world itself is as unstable as it has ever been, with an impending sense that WWIII could break out at any time. Another company – Valhalla – is the mood to take over Oakley and her boss is clearly ready to sell up.
This creates a moral quandary for Isobel as she disagrees with Valhalla’s practices, especially their ideal of a world where heavens can be designed with anyone in it without their say-so, whereas the law currently demands that both parties opt-in. Although for many this will mean a harmless celebrity will appear in the heavens of others, it also opens up the possibility that rapists and paedophiles can insert those that they have abused into their own perfect worlds.
Isobel then falls in love with a client, Jarek, who is going to die shortly from cancer. He is charming and everything that Isobel wants in a man, so she is gutted that they’ve met too late. Against her better instincts, Isobel and Jarek have an affair and to make things worse, Jarek’s wife is found murdered the same night that he dies.
The police have him as their number one suspect, but Isobel has no doubts in her mind that Jarek is innocent. She believes that it’s all a set-up, but her world falls apart as she strives to prove Jarek’s innocence with the help of a couple of friends and a cop who just wants the truth.
The premise is fascinating in Cave’s first novel, which has been optioned for a television series already. The very idea that you could design what you see for the rest of eternity after you die is intriguing and opens up so many possibilities in a rich, futuristic and yet recognisable world.
Unfortunately, the author has chosen to forgo the opportunity to jump in and immerse the reader in an adventure where someone’s imagination could take them anywhere and focus on the affair for the first half of the book.
Even when Isobel has to enter Jarek’s heaven to try and prove his innocence, we are left with a sense of a missed opportunity. That said, Cave has a wonderfully descriptive prose, and there is enough here to keep you reading if only to see how it ends. As this is the first in a two-book deal with the publisher, it will be interesting to see if Cave’s next novel takes part in the same universe and, if so, where she will go with it.
THE MEMORY CHAMBER / AUTHOR: HOLLY CAVE / PUBLISHER: QUERCUS / RELEASE DATE: FEBRUARY 22ND
