Jacob's Ladder

Jacob’s Ladder begins dramatically with the young hero waking alone in a bare field to find he has completely lost his memory. When a mysterious guide called Virgil appears, he directs Jacob across a river, which the adult reader recognises as a close relative of mythological Styx. Virgil is resistant to questioning and Jacob finds no immediate answers to his predicament when he is taken to the grey town of Locus. Locus is filled with other children, who live in huge dormitories, eat colourless food in canteens and spend their days stone-picking in fields outside the town in order to create space for more dormitories. All the children have only the most tenuous sense of a previous existence, which comes back to them in tantalising or anguishing fragments in dreams or when they play the evening memory game, pooling their scraps of knowledge. Jacob is gradually forced to accept the unthinkable: that they are all dead and condemned to a permanent limbo existence, but Jacob is determined to resist this grey fate. He befriends a girl, Aysha, from another dormitory and when they learn of the legendary ‘Palace of Remembrance’ they set out with a third boy to find it. Jacob’s Ladder hauntingly describes their difficult quest to reach the Palace and escape to a living world and family they can barely recall.

This is a truly haunting and beautiful book, written in the sparest, poetic prose. Both characters and setting are economically, but powerfully drawn and the whole tale resonates with echoes of both myth and modern science fiction. If there are hints of George Orwell or Huxley in the portrayal of the chillingly controlled Locus, the real genesis of the book lies in the rich heritage of the Hero’s eternal quest: to discover the true meaning and value of his life by confronting a pivotal moment when he made a wrong choice – a choice only revealed to both Jacob and the reader at the book’s end. But this baggage is lightly worn by the author and the story has an uncluttered, timeless feel. Keaney uses the classic compass of the journey, as the children struggle across the arid plains which surround Locus, to ask profound questions about identity and purpose. It is a timely address to young readers in a world which makes assaults on both.