It ’s pretty rare to receive a account book likeThe First Fifteen Lives of Harry August by Claire North — a page - turning thriller that pack a short ton of clever secret plan twists and creation - construction that you just desire to lose yourself in , but also immerses you deeply in questions of what it means to be alive , and the nature of time and selfhood .
Spoilers ahead …
Harry August has sort of the same stage set - up as the also - great Life After Life by Kate Atkinson : the main character give way and is born-again , over and over again , as the same person in the same aliveness . Sort of a Groundhog Day - mode loop that starts at birth and terminate at destruction , whenever death happens .
But whereas the supporter in Life After Life only retains a dim memory of old lives , and seems to survive a petty better each clock time through perplexing trial and error , Harry August has a perfect memory of his preceding lives , every detail . In fact , he ’s rare even among the multitude who be the same life over and over , because he ’s a “ mnemotechnical , ” who can retain disgraceful amounts of information from lifetime to biography .
Not only that , but there ’s a whole secret society of people who live the same lives over and over , most of whom belong to a covert administration promise the Cronus Club . North ( who ’s apparently the nom de guerre for a pretty well - known author ) has pretty carefully thought through how this would work , which is gratify — basically every single “ Ourobouran ” gets one “ crook ” at living a spirit , all in a unmarried cycle that lasts G of years . So , for example , Harry August never meet two unlike variant of the same soul during one of Harry ’s lifespan .
Not only do the “ Ourobourans ” recall events from the future via their previous life-time , but they can also pass messages further back in time . At the start of First Fifteen Lives , Harry August is on his deathbed in 1996 when a little female child comes to his bedside to tell him a message that ’s been pass down from a thousand yr in the future : the world is ending . That , in itself , is n’t a big surprise — but it ’s terminate rather than it ’s supposed to , with the end fuck off sooner and preferably . Which means that one of their form , an Ourobouran , has been roll in the hay around with story .
In a sense , this is a time travelling novel without actual time travel , because only entropy ( and personal memory ) can journey back through fourth dimension . Harry and his fellow “ kalichakras ” experience the same event , and meet the same mass , with minor or huge difference each time . None of the normal people that Harry meets commemorate having met him in his previous lifetimes , giving him a huge unjust advantage over most citizenry . And the cognition of the future , and the intimate knowledge of other people who do n’t remember Harry , give him an almost godlike king at fourth dimension .
Over the course of Harry ’s investigations , in fact , he discovers that the cause of the premature of the end of the world is someone from one of his premature lives — someone who wants to take the figurative godhood of being a good - immortal and transmute it into literal godhood .
The unmixed cracklike addictiveness of North ’s tight plotting ca n’t be overdraw — but the worldbuilding in this novel is also super - immersive . She takes a cool concept that a mess of other author would be content to lean on ( replicate lives ) and construct it out into a whole world of cunning uses , extrapolate all the different ways that people could make habit of past - life memories , especially if they were working with others like themselves . There are nifty ideas every few pages — and it turns out there are two unlike ways to get rid of someone like Harry , each of them direful in its own way .
The other great thing about having so many other “ Ourobourans ” around is that you see the whole chain of mountains of ways that hoi polloi deal with the boredom and limitless possibility that comes from getting to hold out over and over . By this agency , North starts to make out the self-aggrandizing question , of what gives import to existence when all of the basic needs ( like endurance ) are deprive aside . What ’s the point of travel on life , when nothing is permanent and everything is repetitive ?
It ’s a absorbing metaphor for what it ’s care to be animated in the early 21st one C , when we ’re living longer , with access code to seemingly limitless data , and ( many of us at least ) no longer want concern starvation or being wipe out by wild animals . What ’s the item of just hold out and living , in interminable comfort and condom ? In a sense , too , North ’s “ Ourobourans ” are like the radical - rich of late - capitalist order , freer and more herculean than average humans but still trapped in our human race .
The other affair that North explores , without ever feeling kludgy about it , is the gumption of being trap in history , which we all sort of know goes in cycles . You could n’t know on September 10th , 2001 , that something terrible would pass off the next daytime — but anyone with half a brain and a history Good Book could fuck that something dreadful always find . Empires always accrue , economies collapse , war start , the Earth terminate . Harry North visits the beautiful Buddhas of Afghanistan before the Taliban destroys them , fights in World War II over and over again , spends time in Beijing on the evening of the Great Leap Forward , and find the butter churn of history over and over , surrounded by masses who never see it coming .
Harry is constantly create wry observation like : “ I take on Vincent in 1945 . The warfare was gain , but rationing still couch its curtain over my dinner table . It is petty , I have sex , to still find oneself frustrated by how flavourless the food is for so much of my former sprightliness , or how long it read for central heating to become omnipresent . ”
There are two other great things about Harry August , which elevate it above other , similar Book — first , it ’s a real science fable book . The antagonist ’s plan involves some jolly complicated physical science ( with a band of handwaving ) and there are farsighted , involve discussions of quantum machinist and the stiffness of developing new , weird science . Second , there ’s not really a romance , to talk of , and it feels tonic by its absence . Many authors , dealing with such a magical - realism - tinge premiss , would avoid contaminating it with any discussion of science , and would contrive a reason for Harry to keep falling in honey with the same woman ( or military man ) every lifetime .
The relationships that Harry carries over from life to animation , rather , are friendly relationship with some of his fellow “ Ourobourans ” as well as his thorny kinship with his birth family and his foster parents — the more stuff and nonsense Harry break through , the more enthralling and complex his relationship with the family he keep being born into gets .
North frequently uses a structure in which she alternates one chapter that moves the game forward like a bullet train , with one chapter of Harry ’s random reminiscences that help illuminate what ’s going through his mind — include anamnesis from some other life that he ’s lived . This bodily structure actually ramps up the suspense while also greatly increase the sense of excited complexness and worlds - weariness that makes Harry such a compelling protagonist .
North ’s prose is generally serviceable rather than effervesce , but she does pull off a lot of clever quips , like “ Not many woman can drink rum disapprovingly , but Akinyele could . ” Or , in the middle of talking about caged chicken on control panel a railroad train in Russia :
Four hours into the journey and the uneven tracks — more so than I remembered — send out one flying , and its captive , white - feather and crimson - eyed , spend nine glorious minutes in freedom , hurl up and down the carriage , before a reserves man with scale skin and a proffer of melanoma about the jaw , reached out with a exclusive gloved handwriting and caught the bird by the throat . I saw its cervix stint , and the beast seemed as grateful as an animate being with a brain the size of it of a walnut can be to be furbish up to its master and its cage .
The path she manages to carry a lifelike image of this wimp , free but still trapped and terrorize , and actually make you concern that it will have its cervix snapped instead of being restitute to its batting cage , is actually pretty awesome — peculiarly in the midriff of a part where the fate of the populace is at stake .
So The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August is absolutely deserving tracking down , and have yourself into . All the best fiction gives you the thrill of imagining yourself living other lives , but few books do such a great occupation of pass on you so many of them .
Bible review
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