The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August

"The world is ending, as it always must. But the end of the world is getting faster."

My review: wow!

I go through peaks and valleys with my books. I will have a stretch of excellent novels and then hit a rough patch where nothing appeals to me. I had just come off abandoning a multi book series even though the first novel was appealing on every level and shrugged my shoulders and thought "why not" to The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August.

Like a stray cat that showed up on your doorstep one day I don't know what lead me to Harry August. One day my Kindle was empty, and the next it was there. It didn't go through the proper process of being added to my To Read list, it jumped the queue and waited patiently for me. I want to credit r/fantasy but the details are hazy. Wherever the recommendation came from it also lead me to This Is How You Lose the Time War, which was a breath of fresh air as I jumped from one series to the next.

All of this is necessary to set the stage for my mindset. I wanted something engaging, that would make me read one more chapter than I would normally do, and linger in my thoughts when I wasn't reading. Enter The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August.

Men must be decent first, and brilliant later, otherwise you're not helping people, just servicing the machine.

I connected with this book immediately. I was intrigued from chapter one and was hooked shortly after. I knew nothing about the book going in and perhaps that helped grow my seed of interest in this book so rapidly. Because I knew nothing going in I will keep my review extremely vague.

What are we, how do we live? Are we, in fact, little more than consciousnesses flitting between an endless series of parallel universes, which we then alter by our deeds?

The only way I can safely describe this story is that it's clever.

Claire North approached a genre of story in a way I have never experienced before. I found the narrative so engaging that the typical questions I want to ask to understand the science were not necessary. I was able to put my inquiring mind on hold and enjoy the ride as each chapter helped peel back a layer of the onion.

The timeline wasn't told in a linear fashion and I liked those interludes backwards or providing some exposition to help explain Harry August's actions. The pace was steady as the scope and time that this story covers required a deliberate build up and time to let the story develop.

This is a chess game where the endgame is already known and the moves made throughout are just as thrilling as the conclusion. Claire North delivered a complex story while ensuring the readers knew just enough of the active timeline to follow along.

Too many bright ideas happened too fast...and not enough time to consider the consequences.

This is a story about chaos theory and trying to understand who has control of the butterfly. This is a story about humanity, their inherent flaws and if civilization is better, or worse, for experiencing these flaws.

In addition to the genres this book works in there are also themes of religion, faith, and existentialism. The reader is challenged to look at the consequences of human, and technology, advancement and evaluate if too much too soon is a problem. The concepts are never preachy and only lightly offer the reader an opportunity to reflect on them.

The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August was the palate cleanser I needed and was a thoroughly entertaining read front to back.

The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August posits a strange version of mingled mortality and immortality, possibly repetitive, but capable of ending without warning or recourse.

I like the way the MC changes throughout the narrative. He's in very different mental states at different points in time, and the text does just enough to convey that without having the narrative voice shift in potentially jarring ways. Because it's told from one very specific point in his timeline, it grants a clarity of hindsight to experiences which range from euphoric to literally torturous. It also means that there's a bluntness to his descriptions, as the MC is remembering terror or joy, sometimes with little transition between the two. Chapters which are right next to each other may have very different moods in their detail, but his mood mostly changes between reflective and purposeful. The MC doesn't shy away from bloody descriptions, but he speaks about terror and torture without asking the reader to experience it with him.

One thing I think it gets right is that different kalachakra (a word which feels uncomfortable and stinks of cultural appropriation, though I hope I’m wrong) or ouroborans have very different reactions their status. Some want to explore the world, some embrace how full of war the 20th century is and get as much of it as they can, some stay home and keep things going for the future ouroborans to have a better start. It also embraces the idea that the MC, living so many lives in an era when travel is suddenly easier than in prior centuries, would do a great deal of travel across his lives. The story stays pretty focused in Europe, Russia, and the USA, but has snippets of time spent other regions of the world in a way that attempts to demonstrate the breadth of his travel without making the main story drag. It's also repeatedly concerned with ableism and how the mentally ill are treated. Since the MC and his friends have a perspective which is frequently mistaken for mental illness, I'm glad it doesn't shy away from the potential impact of that.

The narrative has a nice balance between mostly linear bits of narrative and digressions to other points in his personal history, it was engaging to read and I love the way it kept from giving away the ending (and the specific context of it) despite the whole thing being told in media res. The discussions of what one in this position of intertwined mortality and limited contextual immortality would do with oneself, and I come away from it feeling as though I've absorbed both a very good story and the summaries of several philosophical papers; mentally stretched in a good way. It's concerned with what the ouroborans actually do as much as it is with what they think about it, so the philosophical digressions are complete enough to be interesting to anyone who cares, but are usually placed so that they further the story and are shortly backed up by action.

I like this book, but I have a few reservations about recommending it. Spoilers are somewhat unavoidable in this discussion, but it concerns the handling of queerness in the story. <spoiler> I think it would have done better to either avoid queerness altogether, or to actually address the reality of the AIDS crisis with more than a passing mention via killing off a character with it. It irks me even more because that character is possibly queer, and I say possibly since she is implied to have AIDS because of drug use in this life, but in a previous one she didn't sleep with the MC because she was "giving homosexuality a go". The narrative treats it as noteworthy only as one of two reasons she didn't have a relationship with him in one life, the other was a life in which she was married. The other time queerness is explicitly discussed within the text is when the (male) MC is considering whether he should allow himself to be seduced by the (male) villain. No seduction is attempted, and thus it remains a thought exercise of hypothetical homosexuality, mostly notable for the MC's musings that he must be feign being appalled by any such attempt because of the era in which he was born. </spoiler>

The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August is an entertaining time-travel meets Dr. Faustus suspense novel. It seems that time-travel novels about characters who either live their lives backward (e.g. Martin Amis' Time's Arrow ) or live them over and over again have a literary step-up on the more usual get in the machine and see the Morlocks story. I think this is because it is easier to draw parallels to our own short lives, and so enable finer literature in the former. As good as this novel is, these parallels are mostly hinted at, and the presence of the usually unmentioned time-travel paradoxes is a mild distraction.
Still, I recommend it, and it is better than many others in this sub-genre of science fiction.
Paradoxes that come to mind are: If your life is lived over and over again, is there a first time? What is special about the first time, i.e. does reality have a single time course and you are altering it over and over? If you are alive, and another kalachakra who was born before you is killed before they can be born, how will you experience it? Since so many dependent things will suddenly change in the part of your life that you have already lived, might you even suddenly cease to exist?

Let me start by saying: I really wanted to like this book. The author writes well, the premise is intriguing, and I'm a sucker for books that spiral in time. That said, either I'm stupid (distinct possibility) or it was unnecessarily complicated.

It started and ended strong, but in the middle, I became impatient with the details - not all were relevant to advance the plot or deepen the characters, and I found myself frustrated trying to keep track of everything - only to realize it didn't really matter in the overall arc of the story. I also think that despite the complexity (or maybe because of it?) the author missed opportunities to tie some of the loose threads back into the story in a way that would've made it even more clever (and more poignant).

Lots of people clearly like it, so maybe I wasn't paying enough attention. My advice: enter with tempered expectations and they may be blown away.