Viking Canada, 319 pp, $35, hardcover.

Perhaps it's something in the water. All the characters in Jeffrey Moore's new novel are struggling with an aspect of their memory. Noel Burun, for example, is both a hyperamnesiac (with exact and unremitting recall) and a synaesthete (visualizing words and sounds as blazes of colour); he is barely able to function in the social world. His mother, Stella, is quickly fading away in the grips of early-onset Alzheimer's. Both Norval Blaquií¨re and Samira Darwish are minor-league celebrities, each seeking to escape from, and forget, their pasts, while Jean-Jacques Yelle revels in memories of his childhood, with a gleeful optimism and a love for terrible jokes. Over the course of the novel, these characters converge, ostensibly to care for Stella and seek a cure for her decline. As they begin to interact, the syndromes develop quickly from diagnoses and abstractions to become fully realized characters.

With The Memory Artists, Montreal writer Moore, who was awarded the Commonwealth Writers Prize for his first novel, Prisoner in a Red-Rose Chain, has created a metafictive puzzle box, a carefully structured collage of narrative voices, journals, ephemera, footnotes, and commentary. While the metafictional conceits occasionally become cloying, the novel is a delight to immerse oneself within.

Moore, unfortunately, spends so much time on style that he loses sight of his substance. Boiled down to narrative fundamentals, The Memory Artists is simplistic; thematic unity is hampered by the contrary pull of the voices.

It doesn't help that after 280 pages of challenging, often beautiful, and frequently inspired narrative play, Moore resorts to banal, clichéd summaries to introduce unnecessary closure for each character, as if The Memory Artists were a B-grade movie of the week. In fact, had the novel ended on page 281, it would have been far stronger, more enigmatic, and thought-provoking. As it stands, however, it does little more than limp disappointingly to a halt.