Before I Go to Sleep

Before I went to sleep last night (harhar), I picked up this book. I ended up not putting it down until I finished it almost two hours later. Despite my doubts about some of the believability of this story, I have to admit that SJ Watson grabbed me pretty thoroughly.

The story concept is based on the viewpoint of Christine Lucas, an “anterograde amnesiac” who cannot form new memories and forgets things as she sleeps overnight. Christine wakes up every morning to find her husband Ben in bed, who she does not recognise, and must look at photos and scrapbooks every day in order to relearn who she is. She receives a call from a Dr Nash, who tells her that she has been writing a journal so that she can retain some memories from day to day. Over the course of the journal, Christine grows ever more distrustful of her husband and Dr Nash - it appears that one or both of them are lying to her about her past. She remembers a son, Adam, whose existence is initially denied then confirmed by both Ben and Nash. An old best friend, Claire, is reported to have moved to New Zealand, and her previous aspirations of being a writer seem never to be mentioned. Aided by sparse recollections of memories, she eventually manages to get in contact with Claire. It transpires that the man she is living with is not in fact Ben, but Mike, a man she had been having an affair with and who subsequently lured her to a hotel and beat her, causing her amnesia. [synopsis to be finished]

I felt that the author succeeded in conveying the fear of the unknown that amnesiacs can face - the reader finds out about Christine's life even as she does. As I mentioned before, the novel succeeds in maintaining the level of suspense throughout the plot, and for a short read it was quite engrossing. I disagree with some of the other reviewers who seem to get hung up on the lack of medical accuracy with regards to amnesia - it is obvious that the premise of Christine investigating herself relies on being able to hold memories for more than a few minutes. It's a fictional novel and I don't think the degree of suspension of belief here is implausible or unwarranted.
My negative points about the book would have to be the difficulty with understanding Christine. Often she appears to break down at a the slightest trigger, then consider the trigger easily and rationally momentarily afterwards - it was a little jarring and disrupted my involvement with her plight. The other was that the way the events panned out was less surprising than I would have liked - I think Watson dropped a few too many clues about what was happening.
All in all, it serves its purpose as an easy-to-read entertainment novel, even if we learn less of value about amnesiacs than the author might have hoped.