Published by Atria Books on October 11, 2022
The Other Side of Night seems to be a story of crime and failed romance until it completely jumps the track. In the end, it is an unsuccessful mixture of genres, borrowing the worst of each to create a complete mess.
David and Elizabeth Asha had a son named Elliot. David’s best friend (and Elliot’s godfather) was fellow physicist Ben Elmys. Harriet (“Harri”) Kealty was crazy in love with Ben before he ghosted her for reasons she does not understand. David apparently ghosted Elliot by jumping off a cliff. Ben adopts Elliot and then ghosts him.
Harri is a former cop. She was accused for no obvious reason of pushing someone into the path of a moving train. No evidence supported the accusation but somehow a vindictive superior orchestrated the loss of Harri’s employment. Since then, she has been drifting, although she saw herself being saved by her deep love of Ben.
The descriptions of Harri’s feelings are the stuff of cheesy romance fiction: “His eyes told her everything she needed to know. They gazed into hers as though nothing else existed and she was in his world.” Gak. “She felt a thrill of excitement as he took her hand.” She “wished they could stay in this moment forever.” Trite much? “This is what she’d been searching for. A soul to complete her.” Seriously?
Harri wonders whether bitterness might cause her to suspect that Ben had something to do with David’s death as well as the disappearance of Elizabeth’s cancerous corpse and the death of a cop who used to be Harri’s partner. Although she is no longer a cop, Harri can’t stop investigating any suspicion that pops into her mind. She wonders whether the cancer that killed Elizabeth could have deliberately induced. She wonders whether Ben might actually be Elliot’s father. At some point Harri tells a monstrous lie about Ben for no clear reason, yet the reader is meant to forgive and even root for her. I never found a reason to care about Harri.
After dabbling in cheesy romance and the themes of crime fiction, Adam Hamdy turns the novel into a science fiction story, substituting philosophical gibberish for a sophisticated explanation of its premise. Since that premise comes late in the novel, I won’t spoil it by ridiculing it, except to say that science fiction only works if it is based on science rather than gimmickry. Hamdy relies on his implausible gimmick to explain Elizabeth’s disappearing body and David’s disappearance from Elliott’s life. It is no surprise when David reveals that he has abandoned physics for poetry since his ability to explain physics amounts to “all the secrets of the universe are inside this snow globe, but you can’t possibly understand them.” How convenient.
Apart from the failed attempt to save a dying story with an injection of B-movie science, the most significant problem with The Other Side of Night is structural. Point of view shifts a few times, which is fine, but relatively late in the novel, we get: “Readers, Ben has his version of what happened, but I think it’s tainted by his role in events. . . . I think it is important that you hear the truth from me.” Huh? “Me” is the person telling the first-person story, so why is there suddenly an overarching narrator with the power to overrule the story told by other characters? The über-narrator offers an explanation I can only describe as lame.
The story is soaked in melodrama. Dead mama melodrama, dead wife melodrama, abandoned child melodrama, lost love melodrama, all seriously weepy stuff. Even the science fiction that explains the plot is melodramatic. Overwrought melodrama, cheesy romance, and implausible science fiction combine in a novel that can’t decide what it wants to be and never finds its footing.
NOT RECOMMENDED