Claire North: Touch
Feb. 17th, 2016 07:30 amThey call themselves ghosts. Once human, they survived death by somehow crossing into another person's body, and in order to survive, they continue jumping from body - "skin" - to body. Some try to be considerate, some take the best of a body's life and leave them dying, and some torture and kill.
The narrator of Claire North's novel Touch is such a ghost. Long forgotten is the human life he had, the name he carried - even the sex he was. Since the moment before death - a violent death, full of pain and trauma and fear, like all the other ghosts he's known - he has worn many skins, men and women, from all around the world. He has grown into the habit of trying to be good to the hosts he uses, first getting consent, offering payment - money, a new life - for the temporary use of their bodies, for the gap in their lives.
But someone is trying to kill him, and they have an organisation to back them. When his host Josephine is murdered and he barely escapes, the only way he can think of to track down whoever wants him dead is to take over the body of his would-be assassin. What he finds is a file on him, code-named Kepler, full of truths, half-truths and lies about him and his dead host.
Kepler's search for the person behind the lies and the order to kill takes him halfway around the world, through conspiracies, traps, breathless chases and hundreds of bodies, all at breakneck speed. In rare pauses in the action, Kepler's recollections provide insight into his own behaviour as a ghost, and that of others.
A fast-paced thriller, this is also an extended examination of the morality of survival at the expense of others and an exploration of manipulation, theft - or perhaps a better word is rape - and consent. Kepler believes he does the best he can, certainly better than many others of his kind - but the reader may have other ideas.