The Chimes by Anna Smaill

review by Maryom

Following the death of his parents, Simon is leaving his home village in the country and heading to London; he has no clear memory of his past and no directions to follow, just a bag filled with objects that, when handled, help him remember very specific incidents, and a scrap of song that will lead him to a friend of his mother. Simon isn't unusual, for in this strange dystopian world memories are wiped clean at the end of each day by the sound of The Chimes, and lives are governed, directions given, goods advertised for sale, and information passed on by music and song.
In London, Simon by chance meets up with another boy, Lucien, who seems to have more ability to remember than most people, and who seems particularly interested in the small snippets Simon can recall from his past. Gradually Simon begins to remember more, and with growing uneasiness realises he was sent to London with a specific purpose.

A bit like plunging into a cold pool, the reader is dropped straight into Simon's world, standing in the rain at the side of the road, sharing his thoughts and limited memories, without preamble or explanation, and left to work things out for themselves. At first it seems like Simon may be the only one suffering from this weird memory-loss but gradually it becomes apparent that everyone does; unless a memory can be imprinted on an object, once out of sight even things as dear as home and family are soon forgotten - so a story that might be akin to Fifty First Dates or Before I Go To Sleep, quickly changes and becomes something darker. My immediate assumption was that everyone was suffering from some form of Alzheimer's-style epidemic, then when Simon encountered the noise and bustle of London, I wondered if memories were being overwhelmed by all the noise in the way that the constant chatter of social media today dulls us in our interactions with our surroundings, even the people we're actually sitting with. As the story progressed, both of these theories were proved wrong but the Chimes remained as an organised, centrally-controlled form of brain-washing.

The world of the Chimes is a wonderfully strange one, yet believable due to the 'thinking through' of the author. World-building alone, though, isn't enough to make a compelling story, so the author has built in a mystery, part of which the reader is privy to even though Simon has forgotten, and a slightly 'thriller' aspect to the plot.
Being told in first person by someone with no knowledge of what has gone before gives a shifting fluid feel to reality in which everything is observed as if for the first time, and deftly captures how it must feel to be in this predicament.


The main characters are young, teenaged or thereabouts, so I'm not sure whether I'd class it as an adult book perfectly suitable for teens with a desire for something a little unusual, or as YA that adults would want to read.






Longlisted for Booker Prize 2015
Maryom's review -  4 stars
Publisher -  Sceptre
Genre - dystopian,

The Chimes Blog Tour - Anna Smaill Author Contribution

Today we're delighted to be part of the blog tour for the paperback publication of The Chimes by Anna Smaill. I'm always intrigued about what sparks an author's imagination, particularly when their creation is a complete new world, so, having the chance to ask, that was what I wanted to know....
I've seen a lot of people talking recently about how the constant chatter of social media dulls us to the surrounding world, even the friends or family we're actually sitting next to,  and the Chimes themselves seemed to me a more organised, centrally-controlled but similar form of brain-washing.
I don't know if these thoughts have any relevance at all but they left me intrigued about how Anna stumbled upon the original idea for The Chimes. .....

The Chimes is really an exploration of two different human drives – the one towards purity and the one towards mess – and how sometimes art seems to encourage us to view these as existing in a sort of irreconcilable binary.

It will surprise no one that this preoccupation behind the book can be traced to my own experience with music. I started playing the violin at quite a young age, seven years old to be exact, and I was far from a natural musician. I loved it, but the sounds I produced were always quite different from the ones I imagined in my head. My experience with music gave rise to a sort of painful dualism. By which I mean, it often felt like my body was a kind of hindrance to what was going on inside, and the things I wanted to express. I felt exhausted by all that was uncontrollable about playing an instrument – those erratic nerves and wayward physical habits. I also felt befuddled by the fact that, even if I played something perfectly and soulfully, a person listening could fail to be swept up in this, could, in fact, just walk past unmoved.

This kind of overthinking wasn’t exactly compatible with a performance degree; I stopped playing the violin in my second year. However, I’ve remained really interested in the way some art seems to inhabit and draw on these frustrations and impulses. It’s not a strange leap that poets like T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound were drawn to fascist politics – the impulse is in the work, in the straining toward a sort of pure, unimpeachable form of expression, and in the setting up of a quasi-religious aesthetic hierarchy.

The idea that we can ever attain some kind of pure expression is a nonsense, of course. Any two-way communication is always fraught – each party brings their own experiences to the exchange. Mess and impurity is where language and art thrives, evolves and adapts. Discrepancies and clashes of perspective allow memory to modulate into story. Yet my own experience with music is why I didn’t want the Order (the powerful musical elite of The Chimes) to appear in the book as a simple force of evil. I wanted to show the beauty in their extreme commitment and fervor. I wanted to suggest that that there is even something potentially admirable in their vision. I think it’s in all of us, that hunger for extremes.

Hopefully, possibly, some of this seething internal debate is clear in the world of The Chimes! But I should make it clear that I never saw the book as an ‘ideas novel’. I didn’t have an agenda to push or a specific target for critique. I’d hate the book to feel didactic or programmatic in any way. I should, however, probably end by saying that if we are ever in a situation where art is divided between the pure and the impure, I – to quote the wonderful NZ poet Bill Manhire – ‘want to go and stand in the corner with all of the impure people’.