Monday, April 19, 2021

SciFi/Fantasy Book Review: The Echo Wife by Sarah Gailey

 




The Echo Wife is the latest novel by Hugo award winning (and multi-time nominated for lots of awards) author Sarah Gailey.  I've had an interesting appraisal of Gailey's novel-length fiction (When We Were Magic, Magic for Liars)....their work has always been incredibly interesting, bringing up really interesting themes to go along with fascinating characters, but I've always felt that those works never quite managed to stick the landing: there usually has been like one thing that bugs me at the end of each work to prevent it from truly working perfectly for me.  Still, when I say "incredibly interesting", I really mean it, and as such, I pretty much always will check out the latest of their work, and so I had reserved a copy of The Echo Wife well in advance of publication with my library.

And The Echo Wife is a hell of a novel, a scifi tale that uses the idea of a cloned person who has been programmed or conditioned as to certain behaviors to tell a tale of abuse that is incredibly powerful and both really hard to put down despite being hard to read.  Of note:  I've seen this described as a domestic thriller and that's technically true, but the heart of this novel isn't really that of the thriller genre - the book has less interest in whether or not the protagonist Evelyn will get away with what happens than about how what happens causes her to rethink how she herself was conditioned by abuse she received as a child and as a spouse, and everything in between.  It again has perhaps some ending issues....and yet, the ending is so powerful, and a bit depressing, that I'm not sure it even matters.  This is a tour de force that I'm going to be thinking about for a long time.

TRIGGER WARNING:  Parental abuse (physical, emotional), Spousal Abuse (emotional) and the implications of abuse in general - and abusive conduct by our protagonist as an Employer and person in power as well.  Abuse and its impacts, and whether one can really escape being shaped by it, are the central themes of this novel, so if you can't bear to read that, this book is not for you.  There is absolutely no sexual abuse however.  


-------------------------------------------------Plot Summary---------------------------------------------------
Evelyn Caldwell is, to the outside world, a scientific pioneer known for her work with human cloning and in particular, using technology to "condition" and "program" those clones so that they are physically identical to their progenitors and yet mentally conditioned to behave in ways that allow them to fit their (always short term) particular roles. 

But inside her own mind, Evelyn is far from secure, especially after the discovery that her husband Nathan used her own research to create a clone of Evelyn herself who he named Martine....and that he left her for Martine, whom he has seemingly programmed to be a far more agreeable and ideal spouse than Evelyn ever was.  Evelyn's mind whirls at how she must have failed somehow as a wife, at where she went wrong, about how Nathan could do such a thing.  She tries to put this out of her mind by focusing upon her research...but it's seemingly impossible.

And then Evelyn gets a invite to lunch from Martine, who is somehow, impossibly for a clone, pregnant.  And then later that night she gets a call from an even more frantic Martine, who has, in self defense, stabbed and killed Nathan.  

Evelyn cannot go to the authorities - even if she could prove her clone did the killing, for Martine to be known to exist would ruin her career.  And so she is forced to try to find a way to deal with Martine, with what happened to Nathan, and to see the conditioning and programming that made Martine different and similar to Evelyn herself, conditioning and programming that will make her rethink what she knows about her own life and the people who have been in it......
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The Echo Wife is a short novel, around 250 pages, but it packs a heavy punch.  It's told entirely from the perspective of Evelyn, and so the reader sees inside her own head from the very start, which has both advantages and disadvantages.  For Evelyn's personality, her abuse in childhood and in marriage, and her own denial of what is and isn't her own fault (as a result) make her to a certain extent an unreliable narrator, as so much of what she believes is clearly wrong, a fact she somewhat comes to believe over the course of the book.

But make no mistake - this is not a cheerful or optimistic book, where circumstances will convince Evelyn of her own self worth so that she can possibly find a happy ever after.  Abuse isn't that easy a thing to move past, and this book uses the scientific version of conditioning/programming clones through physical and psychological actions to show how in our own life, abuse can do the very same thing.  Evelyn was abused by her father, who hurt her - and definitely hurt her mother - for ever asking a wrong question, making her feel fear is something appropriate for one's wrongdoings.  And Evelyn is psychologically abused by her husband, Nathan, whose cowardly ways lead to him being constantly passive aggressive rather than open about his feelings - and who is in the same fashion unwilling to admit any wrongdoing or to compromise - leading Evelyn to constantly question where she has always gone wrong, and how she has done wrong, instead of feeling like she can ever be right.  

And so when confronted by Martine, and her conditioning and programming, Evelyn is forced to rethink all of these beliefs and memories.  Martine was conditioned to be essentially subservient to Nathan, to want to have a baby where Evelyn did not, and to love Nathan....and yet Martine was able to question that enough to ask the questions that resulted in Nathan's death.  And as Evelyn gets to know Martine, she is so conflicted - on one hand she's horrified that Martine is these ways, on the other hand the fact that Martine, the clone who is supposedly a perfected version of Evelyn herself, can be so easily controlled is something she can't help pushing, and giving into.  

For again, the abuse that Evelyn suffered makes Evelyn herself abusive, something that becomes clear even as Evelyn herself can't quite bring herself to realize it.  She can't keep lab assistants for more than a few month because of her off-page demands and her initial reaction to Martine doing things that bother her is to snap and try to control her for it, even though she is aware Martine is not at fault.  Her very job is to condition and program people - clones, but people - and to then dispose of them when they're not in use, itself acts of abuse and physical dominance.  And as a result of it all - and the book argues, as a result of how she's become through her own conditioning as a result of abuse - Evelyn has essentially no friends or anyone she can count on....even the lab assistant who has stayed and become the closest thing to a colleague can't fully trust her with his own problems because he fears them, leading to a further breakdown.  

Evelyn realizes a lot of these things about her own life, about her own personality, and how it has all gone, as she works with Martine to try and salvage things.  But she can't undo them, and can't quite break free of them all - in a memorable moment of the ending, Evelyn gives a speech to a character to try to convince them to move forward without trying to take a rash and harsh action about how they need to be better than their abusers....and she is immediately shot down as the other person points out they can't be that better person, and the epiphany is thereafter disregarded in favor of more and more abusive measures.  

It's a powerful and devastating story, and it really hits like an absolute hammer to the gut all the way through, especially in its ending.  Its an ending that takes some shortcuts to get there in the end - I couldn't quite believe Martine would go along with the final developments on page except that she had to in order to get to that end point from pages 225 to pages 250 - which is perhaps this book's only true flaw.  And yet, it hits so hard, and emotionally and argumentatively works so well as a conclusion, that I don't really think it matters?  This is an absolutely incredible story of abuse using the power of SciFi to make it clearer, and stands a really strong case for being one of the best books of 2021.  

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