A novel about love and the way we see other people. The basic premise is that some people are born as invisibles, they cannot be noticed by others unless they try, which is often difficult and tiring. Richard Grey falls in love with Sue who claims to be such a person, yet Grey does not believe it. Suffering from memory loss after being the victim of a car bomb, Richard cannot remember the relationship he has had with Sue. Following a brief introduction of the narrator, we hear of Richard’s condition through a third-person narrator, trying to regain his memories but most importantly his life with Sue. He undergoes hypnosis, but the attempt seemingly fails. We shift to the third part of the book, which is a first-person account of Richard’s encounter with Sue on a journey through France. She has problems leaving her former boyfriend, but in the end Richard and Sue end happily back in London. A spontaneous visit to Sue’s house, however, reveals that the boyfriend is there and Richard leaves in disgust, after which he is struck by the car bomb. This shifts us briefly back to a third-person account of Richard’s return home from and their continued relationship. When Sue tries to tell of the glamour, the ability to become invisible, we shift to a first-person account, this time from Sue, telling a completely different story of how Richard and her met. The boyfriend is now glamorous, that is invisible, and apparently so is Richard although he does not know. This part is the most fantastic part of the nove, where constantly relates of the world of the invisibles. After her account, we settle back to a third-person account of their further development, which ends quite surprisingly and I’ll not reveal anything here.

The shifting between variying focalisations creates a strong sense of hesitation about the status of the invisibles, and what the glamour really is. We are never quite resolved on whether it is true or if it is simply Sue who is mad or schizophrenic. The device of the invisibles, however, works well since Priest does not fall into the trap of making it a simple power fantasy. In Sue’s account the invisibles are as much cursed as they are blessed with their power, having troubles keeping up a normal life and often ending as hoboes and criminals. The novel is reminiscent of Neil Gaiman’s Neverwhere in these parts, but where Gaiman’s novel criticises the way people fall between the cracks of society and posits an underworld of these people with much more magic in their lives than normal people, Priest’s take is different and deals more with how some people are simply unassuming and often forgotten and how people often choose to forget in order to keep their lives ordered and calm. Depending on the focalisation, the glamour is more or less present, but it always plays with the notion of life as an ordered continuity, where some things are important and others not. What we take to be our calm lives are really dependent upon the way we view the world and what we choose to forget. The collapsing of narrative levels and temporal passages which occur at the end specifically underlines this point, pointing out how lives are never really ordered. The most gruelling point of the novel is that we cannot avoid hurting people in this process of forgetting and remembering. Richard’s amnesia becomes a condition that all people choose to live in, despite what it does to other people. We all forget, though some people are easier to forget than others.