Dave's Tabula Rasa

Dave's latest effort, Tabula Rasa, marks a return to the intellectual but action-packed science fiction that launched him to fame in the first place.  Charles Tully, an insurance company executive who has been convicted of embezzling hundreds of millions of dollars (leaving the company bankrupt), is given the option of an experimental new form of punishment:  instead of serving the rest of his life in prison, he will undergo a procedure that will destroy most of his memories.  On some level this is like the death penalty—little of his identity will remain when his memories are gone.  On the other hand, the procedure will have no noticeable effect on Tully's body or his intelligence.  He will be allowed to build a new life, in freedom and with no liability for the crimes of his "past self."  He won't even be told that he committed a crime—the "new Tully" will be told that he suffered a trauma that robbed him of his memories.

Once the procedure is done, Tully is held for a few weeks.  The procedure sometimes overshoots a little, and so Tully is monitored while the technicians make sure that he can still function in society.  But Tully's "wipe" was clean, and soon he is freed.  Legally, Tully is a new person, but before the procedure Tully chose to remain married to his wife, Susan, and so she picks him up from the prison.  Tully doesn't recognize her, of course, but his reconditioning has prepared him, to some degree, to return home.

Here is where the story takes its first bizarre turn.  A few weeks after returning home, Charles realizes that Susan is lying about something that happened in their previous life.  The lie itself is not consequential, but Tully is shocked.  He shouldn't have been able to recognize it at all.  It appears that some of his memories are intact, though they are not accessible until something brings them out of the recesses of his mind.

Charles begins to find clues about his previous life, and they spark more memories.  Susan tries to shield him from the facts about his previous life, but to the reader, some of her lies are inexplicable.  Susan is hiding something.  She packs Charles off to spend time with his sister, a federal judge, and we feel that we are on the cusp of discovering what her motives are.  But then there is a knock at the door, and the stranger on the doorsteps announces that he is Charles Tully, returning home from an extended hospitalization.  He tries to kiss her and is upset when she pushes him away.

"Real Charles," meanwhile, confronts his sister and demands an explanation for his patchwork of memories.  She tries to evade his questions, but he has pieced together quite a lot, and finally she tells him about the embezzlement, the conviction, and the punishment.  She also tells him about his previous life—his alcoholism, his depression, his gambling, his adultery.  We realize that his marriage was essentially over when the FBI arrested him.  And we learn that when he was arrested, the FBI found only a tiny fraction of the money that he had stolen.  Susan's behavior begins to make sense.

Meanwhile Susan has managed, with considerable awkwardness, to convince the stranger who thinks he is Charles Tully to rent a hotel room, and the two order delivery food and eat it there.  Unlike the "real" Charles Tully, this man has easily accessible memories of the time period that was wiped from her husband's memory.  But the memories are patchy and mostly incoherent, and from time to time he pauses and loses his composure as inconsistencies crop up.  He is clearly on edge, barely hanging on to the thread, and in his confusion he has become childlike and easily manipulated.  Susan plies him with beer and coaxes his story from him.

 Of course, what has happened is that the team responsible for wiping Tully's memory has intentionally done an incomplete job, in an attempt to track down the hundreds of millions that they assume Tully has hidden away.  A smaller group of conspirators has tried to implant Tully's memories into another prisoner undergoing the procedure.  The memories proved to be too fragmented to track down the money, and the team had no choice but to release the man on schedule.

That's about as much of the plot as I should divulge—I've probably gone too far already—but there's one interesting technique that Dave uses that, unfortunately, probably means that the book can never be made into a movie.  In the last third of the book, Dave starts referring to each of the men simply as "Tully," introducing intentional ambiguity about which man Susan ultimately chooses.  Of course this ambiguity is untranslatable to film, which is too bad in a sense.  Dave has recaptured the vivid, cinematic feel of his early science fiction, and Tabula Rasa would make a stunning movie and a welcome break from the stream of comic book blockbusters and superficial fantasy movies that have proliferated in recent years.  This was not to be—but the book is still a sheer joy to read.