A "review" of Claire North - The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August

You, you were in the shadows
I moved you to the light now, I am your remedy
I, I am always by your side
I was made for you and you were meant for me

Groundhog Day is a really great movie. Bill Murray is stuck in Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania and every day, no matter what he does or how he does it, he always wakes up at the exact same time and place on February 2, over and over again, endlessly.

Edge of Tomorrow, aka "Live Die Repeat" is a really great movie. Tom Cruise is stuck in a war against invading aliens on the morning before the big D-Day-esque attack the humans are planning. No matter what he does or how he does it, he always ends up dying and wakes up at the exact same time and place before the attack, over and over again, endlessly.

OK, so there's this book called The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August. The protagonist is expectedly named Harry August and no matter what he does or how he does it, he always winds up being reborn at the exact same time and place, January 1, 1919, over and over again, endlessly. It's Groundhog Day, or Edge of Tomorrow, on the scale of a lifetime.

Harry doesn't have past lives the way Shirley MacLaine has past lives. He only has one life — his own — he just keeps reliving it over and over again, start to finish, cradle to grave, and he precisely remembers each and every go around. He's born in 1919, he usually ends up dying in the late 1980s or early 1990s of the same ailment, and the in-between period is really up to him to fight his boredom. Harry has a potent, albeit really very limited, form of immortality.

This is a heady book, but through the philosophizing and quasi-scientific subplots, it builds a fairly simple story: what can you do if you never truly die? Or, put another way, what will you do with your time when it's effectively limitless and death is just a mildly annoying reset switch?

Bill Murray robbed armored trucks and enjoyed going to the movies in costume. Eventually he learned French and how to play the piano. Harry pursues other interests. He's not a particularly charismatic protagonist. When you have the time to learn every language there is, was, and ever will be, master every professional trade, repeatedly both serve in and dodge enlisting in the army for World War II, and have an encyclopedic recollection of every major historical event of the 20th century, you tend to be several miles wide and only an inch deep. Harry August isn't a fun, engaging guy. He's a compendium of several identical guys who have cumulatively lived so long that their experiences blur into a long, worn tapestry that frays around the edges. Harry August finds the world entirely humdrum and utterly, utterly predictable.

So it goes.

The book starts with him dying, again, as he's lived another life of idle leisure and awaiting his next turn on the carousel, his great cosmic reboot he cannot avoid or escape, when a youngster finds him on his death bed and tells him that the world is ending.

You see, Harry August isn't the only person who lives the same life over and over again. There are multitudes of Bill Murrays (Bills Murray?) running around the globe since time immemorial, dating as far back into the past as human consciousness reaches all the way up to a distant future when the world ends. The youth of any one generation can relay messages to those from the previous generation as they lay dying and thus create a time-traveling game of telephone backwards and forwards throughout the entire Anthropocene.

Don't lose your heart
'Cause where I end is where you start

Therefore this kid at the foot of his bed is, in a sense, from the future and as Harry lay dying, tells him not only that the world is ending, which doesn't seem unusual, but that the world is ending ahead of schedule. Much, much sooner than it's supposed to end, in fact. And no one seems to know why.

Researching this book after I finished it, I came across a superficial one-star review written by someone who seems to have read all the words in the novel and none of their meanings:

Harry is one of the rare few who remember 'everything'. He is labelled a 'mnemonic'. Apparently he needs to be killed for this, because he could take knowledge from the end of his life and apply it to the beginning of his next life, thus altering the course of events. Why does this fail so spectacularly as a plot device? Because they also repeat ad infinitum that no matter what you do in each successive life, 'you cannot change anything'. It even says it on the back of the book as part of the synopsis. Yet the whole 'plot' revolves around the fear of things changing. Apparently it's dangerous.

Killing someone who remembers their past lives and is thus so advantaged, and is also immortal and will continually, unerringly be reborn fails as a plot device, so it's a good thing it's not a plot device. Such a critique must be conjured by someone who wasn't paying attention to even the broadest stroke of story structure that this book puts forth: Harry doesn't "need to be killed" because he remembers his past lives. Plenty of characters can and do remember their past lives. In fact, he begins his first few lives unaware that his condition is not unique. It's only once he starts saying keywords like "Harry Truman, Doris Day, Red China, Johnny Ray" to other people that he attracts the attention of The Cronus Club, a group of similarly-immortal people who watch out for newcomers and chastise him for messing up the timeline by revealing information to "the linears" that they shouldn't have. This is what prompts the Cronus Club to tell him, "You're messing up the timeline. Start over, keep your mouth shut, and come talk to us." One suicide later and Harry gets to join the club, learn not to rock the temporal boat, and things are supposed to start going back to normal.

It's not that "you cannot change anything", it's that if you do you could massively screw over the later generations and they as children can whisper to their elderly dying compatriots all the way back to you, "Hey, the ozone layer's gone this time and everyone's speaking Esperanto. Cut it out." This isn't rocket science.

Go anywhere you want to go, do anything, you know I'll always follow
We will fight until there's no tomorrow

I enjoyed the ideas that this book explores more than the plot or the characters. Harry may be bland, but I chalk that up primarily to his Englishness. The more time he spends outside of England, the more interesting the story becomes. It starts to peter out halfway through as Harry lives his twelfth life, but it picks up by the thirteenth as he eschews his life of patrician idleness, leaves the UK, and begins to focus on trying to stop the apocalypse.

The real main character in this book isn't even Harry August, it's the world history of the 20th century. A huge amount of cultural and technological change occurs from 1919-1999 and Harry has seen it all, many times over. Through his narrative and the different life choices he makes, the mercurial volatility that the world underwent during this time quickly moves from backdrop to center stage and Harry doesn't always act as an impartial witness. From life to life he must choose to either participate in World War II or sit it out; where and when to travel based on the sociopolitical climate of the day; if and how to capitalize on his knowledge of the future; how to spend his remaining days before dying and being forced forever to be born, grow up, repeat his pubescent years, and make more choices at the same points in his same mercurial century.

Harry may have a uniquely open-ended freedom to pursue his interests and converse with people from around the world with experiences across the millennia, but he himself is strictly bounded within the confines of his own time, the span of a single lifetime that saw both the greatest era of war yet known to man as well as the greatest era of prolonged peace.

Some critics apparently fault this book for not explaining why or how people get repeatedly reborn, or what the science/tech signifies as Harry spends a few lives as a mathematics professor and as a scientist. I doubt these people would be made happy if the author had contrived an explanation for them. To these people, I have a one-word rebuttal: midichlorians.

I found that the core of this story was really a tender inspection of close personal relationships, one that meditates on how your friends can grow and change as you age, and the fantastical twist of you and your BFFs being centuries old and yet cyclically congregating together as children and octogenarians over and over again, the bodies aging and eventually breaking down, but the souls and minds everlasting, to be fascinating.

Some friendships don't last forever, even when the people will.

Look, look up at the sky at night when you're cold and lonely
I'll look back at you
We, we can never lose our sight riding through the wasteland
For an everlasting view

If I had to pick only one critique for this book, it's that the author conceals a fairly important concept vis-a-vis cyclical immortality until it suddenly becomes The Most Important Thing. Normally I wouldn't mind this because a good reveal can be really fun and lets you look at the earlier portions of the book under a new light, but since Harry systematically outlines his lives and how he keeps witnessing the world change through the same eyes time and time again, it's a pretty glaring omission for him to fail to mention such a pivotal idea until the instant the story needs it.

Thematically, the book is divided into two halves. First, Harry lives his lives over and over again, and then one time he moves to Russia. Subsequently, he actually gets serious about the apocalypse. Sort of.

Ideologically, the book is divided into two halves: Chapters 1-56, "being immortal is nice, but it can be very lonesome." Chapters 57-82: "Oh wow, I never mentioned that there's this rare thing and it's totally a big deal that will now happen fifty or sixty times in the next 146 pages."

This is not a video game where you unlock some powerful combo move after you beat level 5. If you're teaching someone to play checkers, you have to mention kinging before you start to play, not when you start kinging. This isn't supposed to be a game, it's supposed to be a novel. This Chapter 57 nonsense doesn't feel like a plot twist. It's cheating.

That said, I liked the story in part because of how it expands on the ideas of a man's life as the ultimate do-over. Harry's world is one where he is unhealthily focused on the idiosyncrasies of his early life and upbringing, largely due to his total inability to ever change them. He broods upon his father and his family life for far too long, and as I read Harry's whining for the ninth time it began to dawn on me that if I lived the same life forever, I could be anything: a doctor, a lawyer, a career criminal, a hero, or a coward, and all of the above over multiple successive runs, but I'd always forever be my parents' son, continually five years old and also four, five, six hundred years old at the same time. And of course, when there's one thing you can't change, that's the one thing you wish you could.

External links

Claire North Unmasked! Why 1 Life Isn't Enough For Harry August Author - io9.com