Touch

Touch (2015)
By Claire North

I may have mentioned before that I'm not particularly keen on sci-fi. With the number of absolutely fantastic sci-fi novels I've read in the past few months though, I'm starting to rethink this opinion. Utterly unique, Touch is another absolute gem.

A very unusual spin on a ghost story, Touch follows Kepler, an entity who can move from one body to the next, taking control of another person just by touching them. Sometimes the bodies are willing participants; sometimes they taken unaware, only to find themselves in an unexpected place with no explanation for missed time (sometimes minutes, sometimes hours, sometimes years).  

Kepler is happily, consensually, inhabiting the body of a young woman called Josephine Cebula when she is tracked down by an assassin who murders Josephine in an attempt to kill Kepler. Grief-stricken and angry, Kepler begins a one-woman (or one-man, depending on current "skin") crusade to bring down Aquarius, the organisation that wants Kepler and all the other ghosts like Kepler, dead.

Touch crosses continents and centuries, with Kepler reminiscing about previous lifetimes - an Egyptian merchant, a Russian socialite, a medical student, a prostitute, a politician - Kepler has worn a lot of different faces and lived a whole lot of different lives.

Some "skins" may have been more familiar than others...

Fascinating and fast-paced, Touch is a wild ride as Kepler runs across Europe, switching from one body to the next so quickly it's hard to keep track. It's a short, punchy book that you won't want to put down. But it's also more than that, an absorbing read based around a completely unique character. The whole idea of Kepler is inherently creepy; it's very unpleasant to think that someone could just climb into your skin, shucking it off when they tire of it and leaving you with no memory of the time you were absent. The potential repercussions of this are horrifying - imagine waking up one day to find yourself thirty years older than you were when you went to sleep, your body (your self) having done all sorts of things, with all sorts of people, without you. Just staying alive requires Kepler to violate other people, living parasitically inside someone else's body and stealing time from their lives. The line "Are you losing time?" is often repeated in the book, and it's a disturbing question.  

Really, Kepler is a monster and we should be on Aquarius's side in this, but Claire North has created such a fabulous character that you just want everything to turn out well for him (her?). Kepler's view on the bodies he (she) inhabits is uniquely respectful, compared to others of her (his) kind:

"You must travel light when you wear another's skin. Everything you own belongs to someone else. Everything you value you must leave behind. It is not I who made a family. It is not I who made a home. It is someone else, whose face I borrowed for a little while, whose life I lived and who may now live the life I lived as I move on". Yes, Kepler steals other people's lives for personal gain, but he (she) also tries to improve the bodies' lives for them, leaving each in a better position than she (he) found them - with a handbag full of cash, or a wardrobe full of designer clothes, or a university degree. Kepler may be a monster, but it's a monster with a soft heart.

It's a fantastic read, but it's also thought-provoking, poignant and often beautifully written. In Touch, author Claire North has taken a fairly far-fetched idea (wasn't there a really average Denzel Washington movie about body-hopping ghosts once?) and made it not only credible but also clever, compelling and touching. I loved it.

There was a really average Denzel Washington movie like this! Google tells me it was called "Fallen".

9/10