Available:*
Library | Call Number | Status |
|---|---|---|
Searching... Park Grove Library (Cottage Grove) | FICTION SMA | Searching... Unknown |
Searching... R.H. Stafford Library (Woodbury) | FICTION SMA | Searching... Unknown |
Bound With These Titles
On Order
Summary
Summary
"A HIGHLY ORIGINAL DYSTOPIAN MASTERPIECE" --Geraldine Brooks, Pulitzer Prize winning author of March
"FOR ALL THE POETRY AND LYRICISM, THE CHIMES IS A SOLID SUSPENSEFUL ADVENTURE STORY AT HEART" -- NPR Books
A mind-expanding literary debut composed of memory, music and imagination.
A boy stands on the roadside on his way to London, alone in the rain.
No memories, beyond what he can hold in his hands at any given moment.
No directions, as written words have long since been forbidden.
No parents--just a melody that tugs at him, a thread to follow. A song that says if he can just get to the capital, he may find some answers about what happened to them.
The world around Simon sings, each movement a pulse of rhythm, each object weaving its own melody, music ringing in every drop of air.
Welcome to the world of The Chimes . Here, life is orchestrated by a vast musical instrument that renders people unable to form new memories. The past is a mystery, each new day feels the same as the last, and before is blasphony.
But slowly, inexplicably, Simon is beginning to remember. He emerges from sleep each morning with a pricking feeling, and sense there is something he urgently has to do. In the city Simon meets Lucien, who has a gift for hearing, some secrets of his own, and a theory about the danger lurking in Simon's past.
A stunning debut composed of memory, music, love and freedom, The Chimes pulls you into a world that will captivate, enthrall and inspire.
Author Notes
Anna Smaill was born in Auckland in 1979. She attended Canterbury University to study writing. She holds an MA in English Literature from the University of Auckland and an MA in Creative Writing from the Internatipnal Institute of Modern Letters at Victoria University of Wellington.
Her first book of poetry, The Violinist in Spring was published in 2005 and was listed as one of the Best Books of 2006 by the New Zealand Listener. The Chimes is her debut novel and it made The New Zealand Best Seller List. The Chimes also won the 2016 World Fantasy Award for Best Novel. She was also named an Honorary Literary Fellows in the New Zealand Society of Authors' annual Waitangi Day Honours 2016.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (4)
Booklist Review
Simon is on a mission to find a person in London, and the only information he has is a song. Simon's goal makes more sense when one understands that the England of The Chimes is one controlled by music and memory loss. Every day, the enigmatic elite ruling class known as the Order plays a particular kind of music to wipe society's memory. To remember certain aspects of their past and daily life, citizens rely on their muscle memory and items they carry with them. Those that can't make it from the day-to-day or lose their memory items become zombie-like creatures called the memorylost. Without the ability to retain any sort of history, collective memory, or even written language, the culture is one that revolves around the preservation of the few memories possible and music. Sound seems to envelope the characters throughout the text, which is conveyed by wonderfully lyrical language and the consistent references to everything as beats or rhythm. This imaginative novel from poet Smaill was longlisted for the 2015 Man Booker Prize.--Whitmore, Emily Copyright 2016 Booklist
Guardian Review
A totalitarian regime inflicts amnesia through music in this fresh and complex novel, which shows the social importance of an understanding of the past In an era overwhelmingly obsessed with the currency of "now", it is not surprising that writers are becoming preoccupied with the value of the past and of collective memory. Two new novels explore this theme in startling ways: Kazuo Ishiguro's dark ages fable The Buried Giant, and the fiction debut of New Zealand poet Anna Smaill. The latter is a bold, engrossing piece of dystopian writing which, despite a fiendishly complicated structure and the many distinguished antecedents in the genre, comes across as fresh and original. Smaill's musical training as a violinist is the bedrock of her ambitious storytelling. The setting is an alternative London, where written words and memory have been banned, replaced by an enforced communal amnesia. To ensure this "memoryloss", the populace is controlled by means of an immense musical instrument, the Carillon -- a kind of omnipresent tinnitus. The brainwashing effect of the Carillon has several stages over the course of 24 hours. It starts with Matins, which relays "OneStory" -- the official version of the "Allbreaking", the so-called "dischord" that smashed the past and created the present time. "Chimes" takes place at Vespers. This final outpouring of the day is set at an unbearable pitch, causing not only a temporary dislocation of mental faculties but in some cases a physical collapse too. Its aim is to leave those experiencing it, who follow its call "like ants moving up to sweetness", unable to form new memories, so that the days are an endless loop of repetition, and the autopilot responses of "bodymemory" are all that is necessary to manage a familiar routine. The time prior to Chimes, now lost to history and to memory, is referred to as "blasphony". The plot revolves around Simon, an orphan in his late teens, and the charismatic Lucien, who heads the Five Rover "pact", a group of young outlaws. The London of the book, if it belongs to any period, is medieval, despite Lucien's references to Bach and Shakespeare. Dwellings are scant and basic. Commerce is undertaken through a system of bartering. Food is foraged. Those who are not part of the ruling elite, known as the Order, sign up to be apprentices or guildsmen. The "pacts" consist of unwanted urchins who club together for strength, camaraderie and to avoid the "polis". The Five Rover rule their portion of the riverbank and the city's labyrinthine tunnels, "the under", subsisting by prospecting for pieces of silvery "mettle", known as the "Lady", to be sold on to traders to raise funds. The totalitarian regime expects its citizens to pay for the maintainance of the Carillon, the mechanism of their oppression. With each day wiped clean, Simon cannot immediately recall his arrival in the city. His parents died suddenly, his mother of "chimesickness"; but as his friendship with the inscrutable Lucien develops into a delicate love affair, it transpires that Simon has inherited his mother's rare and dangerous gift for seeing others' memories. Like most people, he carries a small bag of "objectmemories": precious mementos whose origins may be forgotten but which on private examination provide some essence of consolation. The urgent message of a community's need to share memories is compelling, but Smaill also touches on the significance of willed amnesia or fugue, as with "pactrunner" Clare, a self-harming survivor of abuse. Those who have had their objectmemories lost or stolen exist in a ghastly limbo: the hordes of dispossessed are known simply as the "memorylost". There are echoes here of the vital life force of the daemons in Philip Pullman 's His Dark Materials trilogy; when Smaill moves the story on to Oxford for a final reckoning with the Order, the resonance with Pullman's work increases. Frustratingly, the faster-paced action in this later section is much weaker. It takes patience to familiarise oneself with Smaill's vision and lexical ingenuity. Latinate musical terminology abounds in her descriptive passages, sometimes confusingly: "things move lento"; "a slow murmuring until all is tacet ". Subverting the beauty of music into a force of agony and destruction is a daring gambit, while the wider premise of the novel -- that a society must retain a diverse shared past if it is to have a cohesive future -- is cleverly orchestrated and poignantly conveyed throughout. * To order The Chimes for [pound]11.99 (RRP [pound]14.99) go to bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p on online orders over [pound]10. A [pound]1.99 charge applies to telephone orders. - Catherine Taylor
Kirkus Review
A melodic, immersive dystopian tale set in a London where writing is lost and song has replaced story. It's some time after the cataclysmic Allbreaking, and the powerful Order has set all to rights. Every evening now, their bells peal out a soothing chorus of harmony that overwhelms body and mind. Living in an eternal present, residents of Britain rely on the rituals of "bodymemory" and their private hoards of "objectmemories"a muddy raincoat, a shard of platein order to cling to the slippery knowledge of who they are. In inventive language that perfectly captures the disrupted nature of this world, debut novelist Smaill introduces us to Simon, through whom we experience this richly realized future. Simon runs with a "pact" of fellow teens in the "under"the dark tunnels and tracks leftover from when Britain had electricity. Guided by the pact leader, Lucien, whose musical gifts more than make up for his blindness, they scavenge in "thamesmuck" for nuggets of precious pale "mettle" to sell on the black market. Simon has settled into this life despite the unusual clarity with which he can visualize his past, which once included a family. But to Simon's great disturbance, Lucien starts asking him to share these stories of his past, in violation of all social codes. When Simon does begin to piece his memories together with Lucien's, they discover the horror of how this world of seeming harmony came to be. After the deft and engaging worldbuilding of the first half, the second half of the novel slips into a swift and simple quest narrative, but it's one plaited with an unexpected story of first love. As the novel reaches its crescendo, the poignancy of memory, with all its attendant pain and loss, faces down the dangers of a perfection built on ignorant bliss. Entrancingly poetic and engagingly plotted, this is a story that brims with heart and soul. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
After an apocalyptic event known as the Allbreaking, most survivors are left unable to hold on to long-term memories, instead centering their communication on music, which seems to help them remember. Simon has traveled from his home outside of London to the city after his mother's death, carrying his memory objects in an old canvas sack. While given instructions on whom to talk to in London, Simon has forgotten the details and is left wandering near the Thames. There he meets and falls in with a gang of metal pickers, led by Lucien. Though blind, Lucien hears and sings the melodies that keep his crew safe. He also senses that Simon's recall is special, and if he could only recollect enough, together they could change their world. The novel's purposefully confusing beginning mirrors Simon's bewilderment, and patient readers will be well rewarded as the reality of Simon's world swims into focus and the story suddenly becomes gripping and impossible to put down. VERDICT One of a kind, both in its dystopian landscape and use of gorgeous language throughout (including clever musical terms), this debut takes time to digest but is worth the effort. Fans of the eloquence and imagery of Jeff -VanderMeer's "Southern Reach" trilogy and the spare desolation of Cormac -McCarthy's The Road will adore this original work.-MM © Copyright 2016. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
