Dystopians novels truly can be one of the most interesting forms of literature, and oddly enough, I find it slightly satisfying when its ending isn’t a “We won and defeated the bad guy” type of happy ending. But it doesn’t necessarily mean it has to be a complete downer ending.
The Memory Police, while a complete novel on its own, I found having some lingering threads to similar dystopian novels such as Nineteen Eighty-Four (Those suspected of remembering being harassed and detained by the Memory Police and the memory of them being taken akin to anyone who is slightly suspected of even thinking against Big Brother being immediately arrested and either tortured or “unpersoned” in Nineteen Eighty-Four). Even the cover’s image ties into this, the rough sketches of the woman on the cover representing parts of her being forgotten.
The Memory Police start out with little things (hats and ribbons) which have the plausibility of being grounded in reality even with the fantastical of memories being grounded in a more reality-based tale. When novels become one of the things to disappear, we find that believable especially since that something similar has happened repeatedly in the past. This setup of little and believable things allows us to when things like birds and even people’s body parts begin disappearing, it seems believable to us due to the original setup.
The fact that the author herself isn’t one of the people who can remember but rather some of the people who are closest to her (her mother and R, her editor) was an interesting way to make the narrator slightly unreliable. She is relying on memories she doesn’t have but that others do. The control the Memory Police strive to have to keep feels akin to multiple factions of leadership from the past and currently existing, but you can’t really pin it down to one exactly but to know all of them is how to keep from slipping under the control.
In a world that is currently having things disappear and the memories where people may forget the memories of certain animals or environments or ways of life, the ending of the book is very melancholic with a bit of hope at the end. R’s fate is left up in the air, but with the potential to for things to end well for him keeping his memories of the author and everything else that has been forgotten and disappeared. Hopefully, the memories we have of the past can keep us from forgetting.