Review: Touch

Touch by Claire North
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Claire North has a recipe (or so I take it from The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August and The Sudden Appearance of Hope) and I generally like it. She takes a sci-fi premise – a man is born again at the same historical moment life after life or a woman leaves no lasting impression on the people – but that’s only the start. Where lesser writers just dump the premise and run, she explores it, brings out its contradictions, and resolves them. Then, working that exposition throughout the larger plot, she produces an exciting climax where our protagonist, meeting a character of the same nature, has a final showdown determined by the rules of the universe she’s created.

As if all that weren’t enough, she draws out a worthwhile philosophical interrogation about the nature of identity. Who are we if we’re born again with the capacity to “improve” on the decisions we made in our first life? How is it possible to fall in love if no one is ultimately like you? And what might it mean for us ordinary humans if there are other types with superior awareness?

I loved those other two of North’s novels, and I look forward to reading more of her work, but I think this one comes up somewhat short.

For starters, the sci-fi premise here is that the central character is a kind of ghost, a spirit who inhabits the bodies of others. He/she can move from person to person by touch. The mechanics of those movements are vintage North. There are some great scenes where our ghost protagonist, Kepler, passes from a body that’s been shot into the body of someone wounded nearby, into the body of the shooter, and then on to safety by a rapid switch of passers-by. It’s a whole new kind of thriller action.

As this goes along, though, I think it begins to undermine itself. Because the ghost takes on so many characteristics of his/her host, he is constantly in flux. There’s no stability, no “there there.” By the end of the novel, when Kepler declares him/herself in love with a human who’s gotten pulled into a conflict between Kepler and another ghost, it isn’t clear what that might mean. Kepler has been so many different people, has allowed so many hosts to get killed and hurt as a consequence of his/her actions, that how he/she would experience a sense of a self falling in love never comes clear.

It may be that I read this one too slowly and allowed my attention to drift, but I found myself less and less interested in the internal premises of its action. Kepler would be after a character who appeared one way and then after the same character who appeared completely different. I’d get a sense of the particulars of a scene, and then the scene would shift altogether.

As a reader, I’d find myself getting caught up in the action, and then it would change so dramatically that, even after I recalibrated which body which ghost was wearing, I couldn’t recover the same interest. It’s as if North, who is investigating the nature of identity, obscures identity so much here that one of her central premises more or less evaporates.

I’m still on for more of North’s work, but I think this one – the second she wrote under this pen-name – simply outsmarts itself.


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