“The second cataclysm began in my eleventh life, in 1996.”
Reincarnation has been dancing around the collective minds of humanity for millennia. In some forms, we get put into a new body and can live out a whole new life. In others, we simply go back to the beginning and start our same life again, but perhaps with the memories of our last one still in tact, allowing us to have another go. Time loops are curious things, perhaps the most famous one in popular culture now being Groundhog Day. However, that was just one day. Imagine having to live a whole life over and over again.
Harry August is always born in the same place – the ladies’ toilet at Berwick-upon-Tweed train station on New Year’s Day 1919. Around the age of six, he begins to remember his previous lives and everything he learnt in them, having a particularly powerful memory even for one of his kind. Every time he dies, he restarts here. He is an ouroboran, one of a rare group of humans who live their lives over and over again. In his third life, he encounters the Cronus Club, a society designed to find and help those with this condition and who use their abilities to pass messages back and forth through the timeline. In his eleventh life, however, as he lays dying, a young girl comes to him with a message. Further up the timeline, the world is ending, and always ending a little earlier. The ouroborans must stop this coming to pass.
Thrown back into his early life once more, Harry becomes aware of huge shifts in the timeline, with technologies appearing long before they used to, and society shifting in ways he couldn’t have imagined. One of his former students, Vincent, however, seems to be having an impact, investing in all sorts of companies that are speeding along with science and technology, and when Harry learns that Vincent is trying to create a quantum mirror that will allow him to see all possible universes, it becomes apparent that he has found the source of the changes. But Vincent is dangerous, and even with nine hundred years of life under his belt, Harry is going to use all his ability to stop him.
The idea is a really fun one, and I enjoyed seeing it played with, even if sometimes my brain doesn’t feel wired in quite the right way to understand all of it perfectly. The fact that Harry and the ouroborans remember their previous lives (although only a few, including Harry, are mnemonics who can remember absolutely everything) is played well, and allows Harry to become something of a genius, studying a different subject every time he goes to university including physics, biology, chemistry, law and history. Is his perfect memory something of a cop-out? Maybe, but I’ll let it slide. It would be worse if he was the only one. I also particularly like, despite its morbidity, the reaction of himself in his second life. When the memories come flooding back, he goes mad and ends up killing himself while young. This seems a curiously rational response to me, rather than having him just accept things from the off. It also doesn’t help that because he’s born in 1919, psychiatric medicine still has a long way to go.
It’s interesting to see him grow up in various versions of the twentieth century, although for the most part they remain the same as the ones we know, and the level of research is staggeringly good. The arguments as to why the ouroborans don’t change history and do the usual time travel tasks of killing Hitler and saving JFK are nicely explained with the Cronus Club adage, “Complexity should be your excuse for inaction.” The timeline is so unpredictable that it’s hard to remove the one single factor that caused or prevented something, because more often than not there isn’t one simple switch to flick.
I felt the book was a little let down by the ending – it’s one of those where you realise there aren’t enough pages left for everything that needs to happen – but it’s nonetheless an interesting and exciting journey full of unique concepts, interesting characters and more ethical philosophy than I perhaps expected. It’s not necessarily a quick read, and parts of it drag a little due to the denseness of some of the scientific concepts, but despite all that I’m not in the least saying it’s a bad book. It’s clever and sharp and accomplished, just not one to be dashed off in the dentist’s waiting room.
Did you know that as well as reviewing everything I read, I also write novels, too? My books blend black humour with light horror, crossing genres with ordinary characters dealing with extraordinary circumstances. Head over to wherever you buy books to take a look at my two offerings. The first, The Atomic Blood-stained Bus, introduces you to a cannibal, an ex-god and the last witches of Britain, while the second, The Third Wheel, follows a man who is tired of being single while all his friends get married, but has a change of priority when aliens invade the planet. I hope you enjoy!