Literature / The Sudden Appearance of Hope

'"Have you got Perfection?"'

Things that are difficult when the world forgets you:

* Dating

* Getting a job

* Receiving consistent medical attention

* Getting a loan

* Certificated eductation

* Getting a reference

* Getting service at restaurants

Things that are easy when the world forgets you:

* Assassination

* Theft

* Espionage

A 2016 science fiction/thriller written by Claire North, pseudonym of Catherine Webb.

Hope Arden is an English woman with an unusual "condition": no one she meets can remember her. Within 60 seconds of getting out of sight of another person. they will forget her. As such, having a normal life with a job, house, relationships and friendships is impossible; out of necessity, she is a professional thief, specialising in stealing expensive jewelry and selling it on the dark web.

On what is supposed to be a routine job for Hope—stealing a diamond necklace during a party in the Burj Khalifa Hotel in Dubai—she has a chance meeting with two girls, Rheina and Leena, who introduce Hope to the app "Perfection". Perfection is an app/social network that tells its users what to do to make them "perfect", developed by the sinister syndicate Prometheus. Unfortunately, Perfection has turned Rheina bulimic and depressive, and she commits suicide shortly after meeting Hope. Thereupon, Hope now wishes to steal the diamonds not only for the money, but to take revenge on the makers of Perfection, who organized the party where she was planning to steal the diamonds.

After the theft of the diamonds, Hope starts being followed and threatened by associates of Prometheus, who are now after her because they feel she offended them by "ruining their party". It soon becomes apparent that Hope has bitten of a bit more than she can chew this time, and she soon has to flee accross the world from Prometheus. Still wanting revenge on the makers of the Perfection, she teams up with a woman code-named "byron14", who proposes Hope undergoes Perfection's "treatments" because that might cure her "condition".

Tropes in this work:

• The Beautiful Elite: Invoked and deconstructed: Perfection claims to make its users "perfect" and to turn them in to the beautiful, wealthy elite. There's even a special club within Perfection's user base that only the users that score a million points get access to, and they are the most exclusive of the exclusive.
• Book Dumb: As a teenager, Hope doesn't do well in school, and teachers say to her she will never achieve anything. Then at age 16 she develops her "condition", and consequently has to drop out of school, so she doesn't even have a secondary school diploma. As an adult she is very smart and resourceful though, and has a lot of knowledge.
• Braids of Action: Downplayed—Hope ties her (very long) hair back whenever there's an action scene coming, but it usually is a pony tail rather than braids.
• Cassandra Truth: Hope deparately tries to warn Gauguin and Prometheus that the meeting of the "206" club will be a disaster, but Gauguin just says that Rafe doesn't listen to him and still wants the event to happen; Gauguin doesn't seem to really care. In the end the event goes through and indeed, as Hope had warned, a mass murder ensues.
• Classy Cat-Burglar: Hope becomes a professional thief because that is the only way to survive for her, and she becomes very good at it. She is also very smart and beautiful doing it.
• Cool Big Sis: Hope to her little sister Faith, who is physically and mentally disabled and will need a lot of medical care for her entire life. Prior to developing her "condition", Hope is a very loving and devoted sister to Faith. Hope has to leave her family at sixteen, but as an adult she donates big sums of money to the institution where Faith then lives, to ensure that Faith gets good care—all of this anonymously, so no one knows Hope was actually the one donating the money.
• Driven to Suicide:
  • What sets off the plot is a girl called Rheina committing suicide; she was driven to this by use of the app Perfection, which made her develop bulima, depression and social anxiety.
  • Subverted for Hope herself: after developing her "condition" at age sixteen, she briefly wants to commit suicide because of it, but decides she wants to live in the end.
  • The story ends with byron14 committing suicide, because Prometheus has found them now and will want to take revenge for the events in Venice. So she jumps off a cliff of a Scottish island.
• Ear Worm: In-Universe, Hope often has the song "Macarena" stuck in her head.
• Family Theme Naming:
  • Hope's little sister is called Faith, also a Virtue.
  • Cousins Rheina and Leena's names rhyme, of course.
• Genre Buster: Mostly marketed as science fiction, but the book is also a (techno-)thriller and psychological novel.
• I Am Very British: Hope is English, and always recognized as such by everyone she meets since she apparently has a strong accent. Though she also can put on a convincing American accent if needed, also speaks many other languages, and can easily pass as a different nationality because of her being Ambiguously Brown.
• Immigrant Parents: Hope's mother was born in Eritrea and moved to England as a young woman; this is told in flashbacks.
• It's Personal:
  • Hope initially wants to steal the diamonds in Dubai for the money, but after Rheina commits suicide, Hope is so enormously disgusted by Perfection, that she decides to steal the diamonds just to spite its makers, who organized the party where she stole them.
  • This in turn sets Perfection's makers up against Hope. The monetary value of the diamonds is not important to them—they purely go after Hope because they are offended at her daring to steal at their party.
• Kryptonite Factor: Hope's modus operandi is based on that people will forget her, so that she can get away with anything. Her weak point, however, is CCTV and other types of recordings: as long as someone looks at a photo of her, they will not forget her. As such, she is always on the lookout for cameras, and tries to avoid places that have them. Also, recordings such as fingerprints are a threat to her.
• The Lost Lenore: Downplayed since he is not dead—but then again she might as well be dead to him... Hope has been in love for years with, and is still pining for, an Interpol agent called Luca Evard. Unfortunately, given Hope's "problem", he doesn't remember ever meeting her, of course.
• Meaningful Name:
  • The main character is called "Hope", though it seems to be almost ironic, as her "condition" makes her life extremely hard. "Hope" is the main thing keeping her going, though.
  • A woman code-names herself byron14 on the dark web, after Lord Byron; a poem by Lord Byron is meaningful to the plot.
  • The organisation that developed Perfection is called Prometheus—very fitting since the myth is about a god gifting fire to humans against the other gods' wishes, and the organisation Prometheus thinks they are giving a similar thing to humanity with their app.
• Only Known by Their Nickname: Because Hope meets many of the other characters through the Dark Web, with all the shadiness and secrecy that entails, she only knows most of them by their online handle. The woman she spends a considerable amount of time with is only known as byron (after the poet), and the man from Prometheus goes under the nicknames of "Gaugain" and "Matisse".
• Poly Glot: Hope speaks many other languages besides English; her mother taught her Arabic growing up and as an adult she even knows how to write Chinese characters. Probably justified since she constantly travels all over the world.
• Samus Is a Girl:
  • Hope initially thinks byron14 is a man, but byron turns out to be a woman.
  • When Gaugain meets Hope (whom he only knows by her online nickname "_why"), he also seems surprised she is a woman.
• Shout-Out:
  • A poem by Creator/Lord Byron is heavily featured, and one of the characters code-names herself "byron14" after him.
  • The 90s dance-pop hit "Macarena" by Los del Rio is often stuck in Hope's head, and she recites it to herself to calm herself down if needed.
• Unrequited Love: Hope has long been in love with a man called Luca Evard; she has met him a few times, spent a few days/nights with him and slept with him, but of course he forgets her and isn't aware of this. When she meets Luca (again) at the end of the book, she tells him they have met before but he doesn't seem to care, and even reacts appaled at her revelation they had sex, as if she's beneath him.
• Un-person: Inverted with Hope: the records of her existence (passport, other paper work, fingerprints, camera footage) are clearly there, but they are the only evidence of her existence: to other people, she does not exist.
• We Used to Be Friends: Hope and byron14 start out as friends and even live for months together in San Francisco, working on their common goal of destroying Perfection. However, byron has difficulty handling the fact that she keeps forgetting Hope, starts to be suspicious towards her, and suddenly disappears without a trace. A year later she reappears in Hope's life, but this time their intentions are opposite with regards to Perfection, and they turn against each other, with Hope trying to stop byron and byron finally attempting to murder (altough her intention was only to gravely injure, she later claims) Hope.
• World Tour: Within the first 100 pages alone, the story takes place in Dubai, then Muscat, then İstanbul. Then Hope goes to Tokyo, Korea, San Francisco, crosses America by bus to spend time in New York, goes to London, then Nimes in France and Venice and Milan in Italy. All of this is justified because her job means she has no fixed living place and lives in hotels, plus she has to go on the run from Prometheus when the story starts.

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