Unreliable memories: Laura Laura, by Richard Francis, reviewed

Just imagine: you reach a certain age and you become your own unreliable narrator. Gerald Walker, the protagonist of Richard Francis’s 12th novel, is a retired history professor who fears that ‘chunks of his life might go missing’. Laura Laura describes a year in his life which, in seamless flashbacks, encompasses most of his past.

It opens with Gerald’s late-night encounter with a homeless, possibly suicidal, waif called Laura. She revives his suppressed memory of a previous Laura, a research student with whom he’d had an illicit fling, best forgotten. This is an amusing study, with a serious underlying theme, of the tricks memory can play, particularly if, like Gerald, you’re a socially inept academic with a wife — Abby — who is as unreliable as your own powers of recall.

Gerald finds that not only are there events in his own life which he can’t remember or hasn’t examined; there’s also much that he doesn’t know about his wife’s life. For instance, where is she most of the time? Out, it seems — either assisting a potter, who has lost a hand, or riding a horse called Dorothy. (Don’t ask.)

Abby acts as a literary stooge to her husband: certain and sufficient unto herself, and keeper of the past he’s forgotten. Gerald, meanwhile, lives in a state of angst and uncertainty, not helped by his friend Terence, a dotty physicist, who introduces him to the equally mad but potentially comforting ‘many worlds’ theory, in which what you don’t do co-exists with what you do.

There’s a comedy of errors with the two Lauras, and also with Terence, who takes a shine to Abby but settles for her widowed sister Judith — ‘adultery at one remove’, as Gerald puts it. (Cue to a flashback of Gerald’s and Judith’s one-night stand.)