We first meet Jane O in the consulting room of Henry Byrd, a New York psychiatrist. Jane, a 38-year-old librarian, is neat, quiet, outwardly unremarkable. She sits without saying anything, then gets up and leaves. Her visit has lasted just 14 minutes and Henry fears he will not see her again. He detects in her “a loneliness of the soul … [like] a pine tree growing alone on a great, wide plain”.
Their next encounter proves even stranger. Jane has been discovered unconscious in a public park with no memory of how she got there. A day of her life has gone missing and she is anxious about the welfare of her young son Caleb, who she failed to collect from nursery during her “blackout”. Terrified about how she might be judged for this memory lapse, she finally gives an account of the inexplicable event that brought her to Henry in the first place.
“I saw someone on the street who I know is not alive,” she says, assuring him at the same time that she does not believe in ghosts. Yet she insists the man she saw, whom she knew briefly as a teenager, has been dead for 20 years. He now appears to be middle-aged, and dressed in medical scrubs – Jane recalls how as a young man he had harboured the ambition to become a doctor. He calls her by name, and they talk for a few minutes as if nothing unusual has happened. Near the end of the conversation, the dead man – whose name, we later learn, is Nico – says to Jane: “If you can, I’d get out of the city.”
“An unsettling picture came into my mind,” Henry reflects, “Jane on a crowded street corner, speaking for several minutes into thin air.”
Subsequent interviews reveal that Jane’s memory is unusual not for being faulty but for being flawless. She normally remembers everything in photographic detail, an attribute that makes her recent blackout all the more disturbing. Through his notes on Jane’s case – an account he grows increasingly certain will never be shared with anyone – we realise that Henry is also leaving gaps in his testimony: why is he reluctant to divulge what happened to his wife? And why has he been shunned by other members of his profession, so much so that he is surprised Jane ended up coming to him at all?
As the narrative thread is passed from Henry to Jane, we learn more about the traumatic circumstances of Nico’s death and about how Jane’s preternatural memory made her feel isolated as a child, leading her to change her surname and move to New York. Meanwhile, Henry is questioned by a police detective who is investigating the background to Jane’s missing hours: was she in the grip of a dissociative fugue state, as Henry contends, or has she been lying about what happened, for reasons unknown? The detective has news for Henry: important aspects of Jane’s account are demonstrably untrue. Then, just as Henry is beginning to gain Jane’s confidence, she disappears again.
It would be unfair to spoil the reader’s pleasure by giving away any more of the plot or its rationale. Suffice it to say that there is a rationale, and that the manner in which the dots are eventually joined proves both moving and unexpected. Walker’s previous novels have played with speculative ideas – her 2012 debut The Age of Miracles posited a global eco-disaster precipitated by the slowing of the Earth’s rotation, while her 2019 novel The Dreamers charts the effects of a contagious sleeping sickness on a college town in California – and so it should come as no surprise that this third novel also turns out to be much more than a simple missing persons narrative. Walker handles the science fictional conceit confidently and with attention to detail, and indeed it is this aspect of the story that ultimately proves most satisfying.
There are a couple of secondary themes – the disproportionate public attention paid to missing white women, the social and psychological stress of new motherhood – which, while interesting and important, are given insufficient space for proper development; similarly, the characters of both Jane and Henry seem underwritten. The fact that Walker allows them to give only a partial account of themselves makes them not only tricky to interpret, but difficult to know. While the flattened and rather colourless style of Henry’s delivery in particular is clearly deliberate – we are reading a case study, not a private diary – the stylistic choice that Walker has made here compounds the problem. The twists and turns of the narrative offer plenty to keep the reader engaged, but there is much hinted at in both characters’ backgrounds that is left unexamined. Deeper characterisation would have made their eventual predicament more affecting.
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These minor quibbles aside, The Strange Case of Jane O is an unusual, involving read. The fact that Walker draws inspiration from real-life psychiatry and historical incident adds an extra dimension. A book of case studies relating to premonitions that Jane claims to have seen on Henry’s desk is by John Barker, a British psychiatrist who set up a “premonitions bureau” in the wake of the Aberfan disaster of 1966, after learning of several victims of the deadly landslide who had reportedly foreseen their own deaths. The bureau was closed as the result of Barker’s own premature death, which in its turn had been predicted by two of the respondents to the “call for premonitions” Barker had put out.