The strangely domestic angle this book took was baffling in a way I don't think was self aware or an artistic choice. Some of the minuate, of which there is more than made sense to me, could have existed in another context, too much of it felt divorced from the memory police. Even the theme of memory barely felt like a factor. A small scope could have worked if the atmosphere felt heavier, or if the book developed atmosphere at all.

Characters' thoughts and conversations were noticeably cyclical and slightly heavy handed or a deadend. Things are stated or revealed early, severing the chance of a slow discovery and immersion, and then never expanded beyond how they're rendered in those first conversations or observations.

The author seems almost to point to threads and concepts that would be more interesting to explore and then retreats back into its domestic frame after the barest attention is paid to it.
So many head turning concepts fade away (and not in a meta way), to be replaced by discussions of vegetables, neighbours, a rescue dog and one-off interactions or repeated, unyielding talking points. A glass paperweight and a child's fingernails are given more attention than the protagonist waltzing into a Memory Police Headquarter, which apparently arouses as little suspicion as possible and never bears the fruit of further action or the acquisition of new information.
Instead, we sit in boats that aren't boats asking old men the same questions, or opening trapdoors and delivering dinner or cutlery and marveling at the smallness of rooms.

The character of R was perhaps the only person I was truly compelled by. I cannot help thinking, if the author was unwilling to expand upon anything after it's been mentioned a singular time, he might as well have been the main character. 
Harbouring memories is a burden that is barely explored, we only see his mild frustration at those around him not doing so, and even those instances are brief. He spends his time in the book being nice and tries to stoke their memories; he's not angry or even fearful that he remembers, and instead treats it as a precious resource and skill to be passed on, but even this isn't given much time.
And the expansiveness of his mind, restricted to his confined surroundings, is not given much grace at all. So many questions could have been asked and explored, about where a person begins and ends in circumstances where he is holding on to his inner world at the expense of his material one. 
He is called to mind to give the readers a jolt of fear at him being discovered. Do the Memory Police kill? At what point is so much blatant memorisation means forgoing experimentation and cutting to the chase, or is there something worse? What are the Memory Police's facilities like? This danger feels more mythological than anything because, in the end, no external complications and no internal exploration of anything really occurs. 
An old man so clearly fated to die does so, to not even that much fallout, despite the focus put on him. 
There is one parallel, something with honest to god thematic relevance (difficult to say since this book seems to forget its themes, again not even in a meta way) that can't be enjoyed for long because it's at the end of the book, and is surrounded by such an obvious lack of attention to its themes, in the end it is simply a remainder, an easteregg.

This was a novel crying out to be intricately written - the writing had its moments, there was a few water metaphors which I thought would become a motif but didn't - and surreal and trippy - in the book's dying breaths, there is body horror that felt like finally grasping a thread of something of thematic relevance - but in the end it feels like a promise of something vividly rendered - which even with its small scope it doesn't manage to achieve at all - and philosophically ambitious that in the end, feels like even the protagonist’s memories, and the reader’s, have been left largely untouched and unreckoned with.