Lost Memory of Skin conveys the reader out of their comfort zone and into that area that all good fiction aspires to inhabit, full of challenging ideas and questions that brook no easy answers.
In the opening scene, the central protagonist, the Kid, visits a Florida library and asks to use the internet. This may not seem either a gripping or particularly challenging opening, but when you learn that his purpose is to use the internet to check that he really is listed on the sex offenders register, you quickly realise this is a novel whose drama is as much psychological as physical. The Kid spends most of the novel in a strange netherworld beneath a causeway bridge peopled by other child sex offenders, one of only two places in the county where he can manage to fulfil his parole terms of not residing within a 2,500 metre radius of a school; the other place is the swamp. Here, he eventually encounters The Professor, a prodigiously gifted academic who wants to research the link between sex offenders and homelessness. At first the Professor seems a potential saviour, someone to grant the Kid a semblance of humanity, but when the Professor’s shady past in underground networks resurfaces, the Kid is forced to become his ally, even as he questions the truth of everything the older man says.
As may be expected from a novel with a convicted sex offender and an ex-double agent as its protagonists, Banks is careful not to celebrate either of the two characters or excuse their actions. But what he does do is invite the reader into questioning the moral certainties that fuel tabloid headline writers. Both characters, it transpires, come from damaged backgrounds, forcing us to ask whether society is now shunning people it might once, with a basic level of state care, have saved. And there is also an interest in the way that the US justice system has evolved into a mix of St Paul and Kafka, with criminals convicted less for their acts than for intent, then punished with a task that is almost impossible to complete.
However, Banks’s main interest in this novel seems to be not nuances of the justice system, but the way technology is pushing mankind into the new era that critics term the post-human. The novel’s epigraph is from Ovid’s Metamporphoses – ‘Now I am ready to tell how bodies changed into different bodies’ – and this change is partly signalled by the electronic GPS tags that each of the offenders are required to wear. This technology not only virtually adheres to the skin, but also changes the spatial relation of the wearer to the wider world, plugging them into a wider network that channels their life into information banks. But the primary change comes from the internet and the easy availability of porn, and the mutability of identity once we start typing words on a screen. The Kid is a sex offender who has never as much held a girl’s hand, but has, from the age of eleven onwards, been exposed virtually to every sexual act imaginable. And as Banks slowly reveals the online chat that lead to the Kid’s arrest, we see how easy it is to conceal identity on the internet: free of skin, we can create ourselves anew with words, but this metamorphosis comes at the cost of being unable to know exactly who we’re speaking to. There is no attempt to excuse the Kid’s actions, but there is a clear sense of the spiral he gets trapped within, and we read with a queasy sense of the inevitability of his downfall.
If the novel has a weakness, I feel it comes in the last hundred pages, not with the denouement of the Professor’s tale, but the emergence of a new figure, the Writer, who appears as if by magic to help tie up virtually every loose end. And the revelation that the library assistant who helps the Kid in the first scene is actually the Professor’s wife is a coincidence so great that even Dickens might have been wary of it.
Nevertheless, Lost Memory of Skin remains a very rewarding book to read. Banks not only pushes the boundaries of what the modern novel will accept as its subject matter, but also, in this one novel, experiments with form more than most novelists will do in their whole career, with some chapters presented as transcript, occasional forays into legal and historical summaries, and a slipperiness of point of view that keeps the reader forever on their toes. Not all the experimentation is successful – I fail to see what italicising dialogue adds, when writers like McCarthy and Doctorow have already shown that dialogue can be handled perfectly well without any markers at all. But perhaps the most successful ‘experiment’ is actually a return to a style that predates the anodyne brevity that marks much contemporary American fiction. Banks here provides sentence after sentence that pulse with bewitching lyricism, unafraid to run on for more than a couple of lines and explore the limits and the strengths of language.