Amnesia

Linda Perry is a senior policy analyst at the Ontario Ministry of
Colleges and Universities.

Amnesia is a stylized novel that describes the experience of a rather
unpleasant boy and his family who live in Toronto. As in the Ancient
Mariner, the story is narrated to a hapless wedding guest—in this
instance the would-be groom—by a stranger, with the emphasis on
strange.

It goes beyond strange, through bizarre, to the downright macabre, and
then well past the point where the reader is willing to suspend
disbelief. The topography of Cooper’s Toronto includes ominous ravines
of wolves and golden-eyed mythical creatures, and subterranean depths
accessible through secret manhole covers, with trains that rocket into
unfinished tunnels from which they cannot emerge.

There is a genre of fantastic literature that includes some fine
examples such as The Gormenghast Trilogy and Sexing the Cherry. Such
novels are the more compelling because the story ranges outside
probability and even possibility. This cannot be said for Amnesia. The
fantastic is too encumbered with the mundane, which like muddy rubbers
prevent it from dancing. Cooper’s characters include, for example, a
little brother lisping endearingly about “thweet puppyth” and a
sullen older brother concocting experiments out of the pages of Dr.
Frankenstein. There is perhaps too much of the enfant terrible, of the
adolescent debriefing, with such stuff as hoodlum friends, department
store shoplifting, disrupting of bar mitzvah class, and yes, desecrating
the chapel with the goy girlfriend. Enough already.