Review: Remember, Remember
- cepmurphywrites
- 3 hours ago
- 7 min read
Review by Charles EP Murphy
Delphine, a young domestic slave, escaped from the household of the monstrous Lord Harvey four years ago and she's been hiding in the shadows of London ever since. The only person aware that she's alive is her brother Vincent, the 'favoured' slave of Harvey. Vincent is so 'favoured' that he has a contract agreeing that he will be freed if he earns his "weight in coin", but in 1770 this deal is reneged on. Now Delphine has save him from being transported back to the plantations with the help of Nicholas Lyons, young lawyer and radical MP for Kettering... and Harvey's own nephew.
In another story, a more feel-good tale of underdogs taking on the system, they'd have won and Nick might be the co-lead. This is not that story at all. Instead, it all goes wrong and a grief-stricken Delphine decides on a different plot entirely to fight slavery: decapitating the British Empire in one act of violence.
What Guy Fawkes failed to do, Delphine's going to pull off.
Elle Machray's got a hell of a narrative hook for an alternate history tale here: not the Gunpowder Plot succeeding, but the Gunpowder Plot as a black rebellion against the slave trade. One of Remember's big strengths is the research Machray did on her setting and how slavery worked at the time, and another is that she sets the whole thing in England instead of the colonies. The atrocities on St Lucia and on the slave ships are referred to, a nightmare that Delphine and Vincent survived and fear being sent back to, but this is England, the metropole, and slavery's here too. 'Nicer' than over there, your master will tell you how lucky you are he brought you here, but still inherently cruel. What's happening elsewhere remains the nightmare lurking behind everything: Delphine could have been sold off at any moment.
Each chapter has a historical foreword and a number of those are contemporary adverts in British newspapers for domestic slaves, even children. In one instance, one of Machray's most brutal moments, we aren't shown a fictional torture scene because the foreword was two sentence's from a historical diary about 'disciplining' a man. This, it reminds us, actually happened and it happened like this. All of this goes on amongst an evocative depiction of the pomp and glory of 18th century parliament and the King's Bench courts, the heady coffee shops of the intellectuals, and the messy and earthy world of working London. It's not a hidden separate world, it's right next to everything else.
Delphine is a character who has learned to put up walls around herself to survive, both as a slave and a fugitive who is at risk of being spotted as such at any moment. She also has to keep them up to survive as a woman in a world of men, a black woman in a world of white people, and a lesbian in a world where she can never be out. When in a crowd early on, she watches how she walks so she's not that little bit too quick and causes suspicion. When she has to interact with Nick Lyons, she's surprised when he's good and treats people well but she can never let on when he's failed, or when she distrusts him, or when he's getting on her nerves with callow and facile comments. She keeps a nice polite face and swallows words. When talking to Grey, the captain of a slave ship in Lord Harvey's service, she has to fake seeing him as a good man trying his best in the hope of getting some minor relief out of him (which fails). In the early parts of the book, she does little tiny acts of rebellion when nobody's looking as a pressure valve to stop from cracking. You want her to get a chance to relax and not have to be so hard, and that's what she wants too.
There are some flaws in the book, and one for me was the point of divergence. Vincent's trial ends up ruling on whether slavery is legal in England, making it an earlier version of the landmark Somerset v Stewart case: the courts had to rule if the slave James Somerset, under threat of deportation for having escaped, could be legally deported or, as his defence argued, slavery wasn't legal under English common law. (Machray acknowledges Somerset as an inspiration in her foreword.) It even has Lord Mansfield, the same Lord Chief Justice from Somerset's case, making a ruling and saying some of the same words recorded from the real trial. The flaw here in my opinion is that the premise of Remember, the whole reason for Delphine's plan, is that working within the justice system will fail and only a great violent act will get things changed... but in our timeline, it did work for Somerset, Mansfield ruled in his favour, and slavery was abolished within England's borders.
As slavery in the rest of the British Empire and the foul trade in human lives would not be abolished until later, the book could have had Delphine decide this isn't far enough and too many will die waiting for further change. Being an alternate history, it could also have put a different judge on the case and have it go the other way entirely, confirming slavery to be fine on English soil after all, the system screwing everyone over and leaving no other recourse. Instead, the story has the real Lord Mansfield in place ruling as he really did and then the fictional Lord Harvey undercuts the whole thing by acting outside the law, which is a bit of a cheat.
Your mileage will probably vary on another dud bit for me, the romantic subplot. It's meant to give Delphine a chance to heal from her traumas and also provide a reason for why she's able to sell a group of smugglers on blowing up parliament (romance with one of them), which is a sensible decision but it doesn't really kick in until half into the book. Taking that time and causing her to so quickly get her the allies she needs means it landed with a dull thud for me. If you have more romance in your soul, you may feel different!
These quibbles don't stop the book being a strong one, with a heroine we root for, a strong sense of place, and a sense of peril because Delphine can't be sure who to trust - and not just in the sense she's working with smugglers to do an act of terrorism, but because the nature of her world is that she can barely ever be sure anyone can be trusted at the best of times. Lord Harvey is an irredeemable brute, an abuser of children and a rapist and a torturer, but of course he is, he owns slave plantations. Neither we nor Delphine expect him to be better than this and he has an entitled strop every time anyone stands up to him. The people who come off as worse are the ones who know enough about being better and then don't do it, who are going to hurt you anyway. Captain Grey believes he once showed comfort to a young Delphine when she was being transported away from her parents; in every scene he's in, he's clearly thinking he's not a bad guy, he's stuck by situation, and won't his little acts of kindness mean Delphine knows he's not a bad guy? Readers will view him with contempt.
For a chunk of the book, we also can't be sure about Nick either and where he'll actually jump if push comes to shove, if he's truly a good man or if at the end of the day, he's just an entitled white man like his uncle. In a memorable scene, he sneers about a protest by silk weavers, condemning them as a rabble, and Delphine considers that while she's met Nick before, today she's met the MP for Kettering.
On the other side of these attitudes is the idea of solidarity among the many oppressed peoples under the Empire. Delphine decides partway into her plot that she needs the help (intended or otherwise)of everyone who's subjugated if she's going to pull it off; and that to be justified, her plot should raise up everyone afterwards.The smugglers she falls in with are a diverse lot in their race, gender, home, and sexuality, all people on the fringes needing to hang together. Various groups of labourers are protesting outside Westminster and to keep everyone looking away from where the smuggling is, those protestors get amplified and will benefit in the brave new world. Â The solidarity push bit doesn't quite work as well as it could with the workers because Delphine doesn't interact with them much, so we mostly see them as protests to work past. It does work very well when London sex workers get involved because Delphine has been working as a medic in a brothel: we have named characters she's interacting with and we get a good look at what the sex workers put up with via these characters we know. They can trust neither boss nor client. There's a very satisfying subplot where Delphine helps her friend Charity retaliate against "Harris' list" - a real directory of London sex workers, Harris's List of Covent Garden Ladies, which is condemned here as a leering insult that puts a target on women's heads - by producing her own public list of terrible clients, many of them important people with reputations to lose.
And the solidarity aspect of the plot feels a lot more 2020s than 1770s but Remember is, like many historical and especially AH novels, concerned with what's happening Now rather than Then. Near halfway into the book, Delphine leads a protest march and has them lie down in front of Westminster to symbolise all the slaves killed in the holds of ships. This is an obvious reference to the 'die-ins' carried out in Black Lives Matter protests against police violence... one of which was done in London in 2020, the year Machray started writing. Later, the Horse Guard charge the protest. The parallel is very clear and it's very effective.
Remember, Remember is a really strong debut novel and a really good work of alternate history.
Charles EP Murphy is an author who, among other works, wrote the books Chamberlain Resigns, and other things that did not happen and Comics of Infinite Earths for Sea Lion.