Reviewed by Harriet
If like many people you saw this title and thought of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde you’d probably be thinking this will be a psychological thriller, and in a sense you’d be right. But it’s almost certainly not like any psychological thriller you’ve read before. No crime is involved, but there’s a massive mystery, the solution of which is in the hands of a New York psychiatrist, Henry Byrd, who is as baffled by the situation as much as the reader will be. The novel begins in his consulting room, where a woman is sitting in silence. This is Jane, and she has made an appointment, but after 14 minutes she gets up and leaves. Byrd is perplexed. Outwardly she seems unremarkable, a 38 year old librarian, but he suspects she has ‘a loneliness of soul’, and wonders if he’ll ever see her again. But he does, sooner than he expects, as a few days later she is found unconscious in a public park, having no memory of how she got there. A whole day of her life has disappeared, and she’s anxious about her little boy Caleb, who she has failed to collect from his day care. Soon afterwards, she’s back in Byrd’s office, and now ready to tell him why she went there in the first place. She had been deeply shocked by a meeting on the street with someone ‘who I know is not alive’. This is Nico, who she had known as a teenager a few weeks before he had taken his own life, but in this recent meeting he is an adult, wearing medical scrubs, and he’s warning her of an impending disaster. ‘If you can, I’d get out of the city’. His appearance as an adult makes Jane certain he was not a ghost, but the experience has troubled her deeply.
Jane’s sessions with Byrd continue, and she reveals that she has a exceptional memory. She can recall everything that happened on any particular day in the past in vivid photographic detail – apart from what took place during her recent blackout. This makes her recent experience all the more troubling, and Byrd, who has started having meetings with a police detective who has taken on her case, starts considering possible explanations, such as dissociative fugue, ‘a form of amnesia in which a person loses awareness of their identity and all personal memories’. But a further blackout ensues and lasts for nine days, during which Jane has been living in a flat that once belonged to Nico’s parents, though once again she has no idea how or why she had ended up there. The police think she is lying, but Byrd is simply drawn further and further in to this extraordinary situation.
Byrd himself proves to be a somewhat mysterious figure. Jane learns that he is a widower bringing up his small child, but he is reluctant to talk about this, and he has had some serious professional problems which have led to his exclusion from some areas of his work. In fact, he’s surprised that Jane has sought him out, but she tells him she had visited him many years ago, a visit of which he has no recollection or indeed any record.
It’s impossible to say any more about the plot without spoiling what is an extraordinarily gripping novel. The solution is almost certainly not what will have sprung to most peoples’ minds, but you’ll have to read it to find out. A fascinating and unusual book, and highly recommended.
Harriet is a co-founder of Shiny and one of the editors.
Karen Thompson Walker, The Strange Case of Jane O. (Manilla Press, 2025). 978-1786585028, 288pp., hardback.
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