REVIEW: THE FIRST FIFTEEN LIVES OF HARRY AUGUST

The First Fifteen Lives of Harry AugustThe First Fifteen Lives of Harry August by Claire North
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Caught it in audiobook format.

I was expecting something in the vain of Replay, the book that, so they say, inspired the movie Groundhog Day. In Replay, the protagonist goes over the same ~25 years again and again and lives the period between the ’60s and the ’80s countless times. Here, it’s the period between Harry August’s birth in 1918 and his eventual death in the ’90s of the same illness every time (I forget what it is) that goes over and over and over.

Clearly, if you cannot see the point of time-loop stories such as these, the premise might sound boring. And in the case of Harry August it did get boring at some point. I thought character development was rather shallow for all the lives they had gone through; yes, they, because—minor spoilers ahead—Harry isn’t the only person to have the gift of apparent immortality in his world. There’s a whole club of them, in fact, but at no point during the story did I feel as if the lives and storylines of the other characters really matter. To top it all off, the bad guy’s motive was very hazy and his relationship with Harry could have been more meaningful and intricate. It was an opportunity lost, especially at a point closer to the end of the book when everything, or so I thought, pointed to Harry having actually fallen in love with the bad guy. Claire North didn’t go through with that, though.

I realise it must be very difficult to write characters that are immortal in the conventional sense while managing to weave a narrative that makes them neither amazingly powerful on the one hand— still somewhat relatable—nor too much like a mere mortal in their wishes, desires and motivations on the other. Harry August and many of the book’s other special characters seemed to fall closer into the latter part of the spectrum above—they had all this power, yet could do so relatively little with it to break their curse of what the Buddhist would call samsara, the pains of (repeating) earthly existence.

What’s more, the world itself didn’t change almost at all between Harry’s different incarnations (if you exclude the plot-related accelerating technological progress), which disappointed me a lot since half the reason I read books like this is for the alternate histories and timelines that emerge. Replay, again, did a better job.

All in all Harry August was an okay book. I found Claire North’s rationalistic, deterministic, somewhat strict writing style enjoyable and quite fitting, and props go to her for writing a book such as this in her ’20s. Regrettably though it fell short in most other respects. It didn’t use its own material sufficiently well, I found.

In other words, I would recommend Replay before The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August if you want to read about a character who goes through time loops.

PS: I went back and read my review for Replay. I seriously remember I had enjoyed it more. Well if you look at that!

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Review: Replay

Replay
Replay by Ken Grimwood

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I started replaying Majora’s Mask a few weeks ago and that was enough reason for me to start looking again for books, movies or other games with a similar central idea. Replay appears to be the original work of fiction which examined this particular kind of thought experiment this exhaustively. In Replay, it’s not three days or a single day like in Groundhog Day –which this book directly inspired; it’s 25 years.

The concept sounded very exciting — if you’re fan of this narrative gimmick like I am, of course. 25 years sounds like enough time for anyone to be able to do pretty much anything they want in and live comfortably. What could possibly go wrong with Jeff’s new life, what could possibly produce any kind of drama and make the book interesting? Well, let’s just say that long-term relationships, including families, don’t exactly thrive on such circumstances…

Every replay was a mystery and the possibilities were spreading out in front of me together with Jeff every time he returned to 1963. But I could not always identify with some of his choices or the way he opted to handle some matters, like

Spoiler
meeting his wife on the first replay or him being content with Judy but subsequently forgetting about her almost completely.

I also thought it was sloppy writing having all the sporting events conveniently turn out exactly the same way every time. In what kind of cause-effect comological system do teams of players play exactly the same way, the same horses come first 25 years in 25 years out? This story could have a lot of extra worth as a feast of alternate history but unfortunately it does not deliver anywhere close to what it could, apart fromthat little bit close to the end when

Spoiler
Jeff and Pamela go public. Now that I think about it, I don’t know how much different I would make every replay if I was writing this story. Too much difference between every time and the story loses its main antagonist (the repetition of time itself) and becomes boring, too little, ditto.
I gusss Ken Grimwood (great name for a writer, btw) wanted to have the best of both a clockwork and a quantum theory world.

Another of my qualms:

Spoiler
Pamela wasn’t the most likeable character. I even found her annoying at times, especially closer to the end, when she gets angry at Jeff for approaching her old self (and he rightly protests). It got me thinking, what do people love in another person? Their personality, the memories they have together? Would it ever be possible to compare and contrast the two? Would it be considered cheating going out with a version of your loved one that has no recollection of you, you know everything about them and the newer version catches you red-handed? Interesting questions, interesting questions.

You know what? Now I want to watch Star Sea. It would be my favourite movie ever. I bet I’d also be one of the geeks that liked Continuum.

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