The Chimes

London, after something called the Allbreaking, and the written word is gone. Memory does not hold: people wake each morning with the day before rubbed out, and carry objectmemories in bags around their necks, small things that hold what they cannot. Everything is ordered by music now. The Order at the Citadel plays the Carillon each evening, an instrument of vast power that beats down thought across the whole city, and communication happens in melody and solfège. Simon Wythern arrives from Essex with a message he cannot remember the purpose of, is taken up by a pact of mudlarks who dive the river for the Lady, a metal the Order needs and will not explain, and falls in with Lucien, their blind leader, who hears more than anyone should. Together they begin to work out what is being done to them and why forgetting is administered rather than suffered. Smaill was a violinist before she was a novelist, and the book is written in a musical vocabulary throughout, presto and lento and subito, which asks patience of the reader and repays it with something genuinely unlike anything else: a dystopia about the political uses of amnesia, sung.