The Amnesia Clinic
James Scudamore Harvill Secker, 274pp, £11.99
ISBN 1843433036
According to C S Lewis, "Grown-ups are always thinking of uninteresting explanations." The quote opens James Scudamore's debut novel like a challenge. Its protagonist, Anti, is an asthmatic English schoolboy uprooted to Quito in Ecuador by his mother's research on the country's indigenous people and his father's lacklustre journalism career. Anti's life is dominated by his best friend, Fabian. A larger-than-life show-off, Fabian is the only son of a wealthy Quito family. Orphaned when his parents died in a car crash, he lives with his uncle in a "huge adventure playground of a house". Scudamore's observations about the racial snobbery afflicting Ecuador - a country in which the descendants of Spanish colonialists still lord it over the indigenous population - provide an astute backdrop.
The two boys, encouraged by Fabian's rakish uncle, Suarez, embellish their lives with bouts of lurid fantasy in which the truth is dismissed as "unimaginative". It's a game filled with shrunken heads, buried treasure and imagined seductions. But with Fabian still unable to accept the death of his parents and Anti depressed by his mother's decision that he should return to England for a proper education, they plan an adventure. Lying about a school trip, they set off in search of the "Amnesia Clinic" - an imaginary hospital specialising in the care of those without memory.
It's pure fantasy, and they both know it, so Fabian's growing insistence that the clinic might exist and that his mother - whose body was never found - might be living there, having lost her memory in the accident, infuriates his friend. Anti narrates their misadventures, but his voice is frustratingly inconsistent. The youthful tone is often jarred by adult language: it's unlikely a teenager would describe a small earthquake as a "humorous addendum to the party", for instance, and many of Anti's recollections feel as though they were shoehorned into the novel from Scudamore's travel diary.
The conflict be-tween Anti and Fabian deepens when they reach their destination, and the novel's de-nouement is precipitated by the introduction of some new characters. Sally Lightfoot, a marine biologist and object of adolescent desire who is tracking a whale carcass down the coast and carving the bones from its body to assemble a skeleton, is an imaginative but vaguely improbable addition to the story. And while washed-out hippies can be found running guest houses in every beleaguered surf spot in coastal Ecuador, landlord Ray is a bland cliché of mellow contentment who enjoys making campfires and says things like: "God, I hate confrontation." Scudamore ramps up the tension for a fight between the two boys, which results in Fabian's accidental death, but the scene feels manufactured rather than entirely convincing. Suddenly, good-natured Anti is revealed as his best friend's killer, without him once hinting at his own guilt or remorse.
The Amnesia Clinic is finally let down by its ambitions. Scudamore tries too hard for the fantastic and ends up exchanging "interesting" for "implausible".
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