The Attack on Myfanwy in the Park

The Attack on Myfanwy in the Park is the assault that strips Myfanwy Thomas of her autobiographical memory and sets the novel’s identity crisis in motion. She comes to in a rain-soaked clearing, surrounded by motionless men in latex gloves, unable to recall who she is or what happened. Her former self had foreseen the attack and left instructions for the woman who would survive it; the scene turns that preparation into a fragile bridge between two versions of the same life.

The attack and its immediate aftermath

The episode first reaches the reader through Myfanwy’s physical predicament rather than a clear account of the violence. Standing in a storm, she watches the writing on a letter dissolve in the rain. Her hair drips, her lips taste salty, and her body aches. Under a nearby lamppost, she searches her jacket for clues about her identity and circumstances. Two envelopes emerge: one addressed simply to her, the other marked with the number two. The letters are evidence that someone expected this moment, but they cannot restore the past she has lost.

The park offers the first stark evidence of the attack. Myfanwy finds herself in a muddy clearing beneath drooping willows, with a ring of motionless bodies around her. Every man she sees is wearing latex gloves. She has no memory that explains the scene, and the men cannot tell her what happened. The gloves are conspicuous enough to register as a detail, but their importance is initially beyond her understanding. The first letter supplies a warning, not an answer: she is in danger, and inheriting the body does not make her safe.

Her response is immediate and bodily. She pulls her feet from the mire and steps carefully over the fallen men, then scans the trees for attackers as she makes her way out of the park. Thunder makes her flinch; cold and pain accompany her through the residential streets. Victorian houses and distant neon provide landmarks, not reassurance. The scene leaves her alive and mobile, but with no reliable account of how she came to be there or whether the danger has passed.

What the former self had anticipated

The letters reveal that the attack did not take the previous Myfanwy wholly by surprise. In a later letter, she explains that reports from people claiming to have precognitive experiences had convinced her that a memory-loss episode was coming. She did not describe herself as psychic or as able to see the future. Rather, strangers had approached her with dreams, visions, or hunches, and their repeated warnings had become difficult to dismiss. Their predictions included the rain, the loss of memory, and the men in gloves lying around the survivor.

The former Myfanwy also anticipated a fight. She knew that she—or the person who would wake in her body—would be attacked, would fight, and would win, while guessing that the black eyes left by the encounter might belong to her. This forecast distinguishes the two selves without severing their connection: the former woman presents herself as an organizer rather than a fighter, and imagines the amnesiac successor as the likelier victor. The prediction gives the survivor a first account of the struggle, though not a personal memory of taking part in it.

Most ominously, the gloves tell the former Myfanwy that the attackers include someone she ought to be able to trust. She cannot identify that person or give a reason for the attempt to remove her; she allows that it might concern something she has not yet done. The secrecy surrounding the assault therefore begins before the amnesia. Even the woman who prepared for it could not name its full cause or culprit. Copies of the letters were placed in the pockets of her coats and jackets so that the successor might find them when needed, a practical attempt to make foresight useful in the face of uncertainty.

A body that remains, a past that does not

The amnesia separates knowledge of personal history from immediate bodily experience. The woman who wakes can read her name on a prescription label and recognize that she is injured, cold, and in danger, but she cannot retrieve the life attached to the name Myfanwy Thomas. The body carries the consequences of the attack even as its owner cannot remember the event. A later letter addresses this gap directly: the former Myfanwy thinks the survivor must have touched someone and disrupted that person’s control of their body, and explains that pain can trigger the ability unconsciously. The attack is thus connected not only to a threat against Myfanwy but also to a power she may have used without understanding it.

At the hotel the next morning, her questions make the loss concrete. She wonders how old she is, whether she is married, whether she has a job, and whether she has family or friends. She considers dreams about Myfanwy Thomas, but cannot make sense of the name or the reference to a rook. The absence of autobiographical memory does not erase every capacity: she can reason from the clues around her and act on the instructions she has found. Yet these practical abilities cannot answer who she has been, and the letter writer herself wonders whether the survivor is made of parts of her or is an entirely new person.

That uncertainty becomes more than a philosophical question when the amnesiac Myfanwy encounters Bronwyn Thomas, who identifies herself as her sister. Myfanwy recognizes a resemblance in their features but has no memory to authenticate the relationship. During their embrace, however, she senses their genetic connection and feels her power flare. She comes to regard the body as hers as well as the former Myfanwy’s, and the sister as belonging to her life rather than merely to the life recorded in inherited files. The reunion does not return the missing past; it gives the present self a relationship through which she can begin to claim the body and its history.

The attack’s continuing consequences

The park attack remains an unresolved danger as well as a lost memory. The former Myfanwy’s letter insists that the survivor has inherited problems and responsibilities along with the body, and urges her to find somewhere safe before opening the next letter. Its warning is borne out by the survivor’s guarded behavior: she watches for pursuit, checks behind the taxi, and treats the possibility of further danger as real. The immediate escape from the park is therefore only the first stage of a crisis whose causes are still hidden.

The event also shapes how the new Myfanwy manages information once she has entered the life left to her. After later encounters and revelations, she deliberately avoids giving the Court a full account of her amnesia. She explains events only vaguely, feigns light-headedness to escape a detailed debriefing, and leaves unmentioned the fact that anyone has lost their memory. This concealment shows that the attack’s effects extend beyond personal disorientation: not knowing her own past makes disclosure risky, especially in an organization where the original warning already pointed to betrayal by someone trusted.

The narrative’s structure keeps the attack suspended between experience and explanation. The reader first encounters its aftermath through rain, pain, the gloves, and the unreadable circumstances around the bodies; only later do the letters establish that the scene had been anticipated. Even then, foreknowledge does not solve the mystery. The former self predicted the essential shape of the attack but could not say who had arranged it or why. That gap makes the park a point of both continuity and rupture: the old Myfanwy prepared a way forward, while the person who follows must decide what, and whom, to trust without the memories that would normally ground those decisions.