The book is repetitive, plot-heavy, and sometimes difficult to track as Harry’s first-person recounting flits in and out of his various lives.
It is also a great example of a nemesis/revenge narrative in which the protagonist must resolve to defeat his closest friend.ĭespite these many positive qualities, Harry August never quite clicked for me. North’s writing is lively but compromised by distracting phrasing and punctuation choices. Thematically, the novel offers intelligent musings on the complex nature of causality, the history of mental illness, the nuances of interpersonal intimacy, and humanity’s accelerating technological development. As Harry’s story unfolds, she develops his world with clever ideas about how kalachakra send messages backwards and forwards in time, how they can erase memories of their previous lives for a fresh start, and even how they can die permanently. This is a truly terrific starting point, one for which North gets full marks. Centuries of wisdom has taught the Club not to abuse its unique situation by trying to alter the course of history––a rule they enforce with usually-gentle but occasionally-brutal tactics. He learns that this tiny global minority has existed for millennia, and most of its members belong to a secret society called the Cronus Club. He appears to be caught in an endless time loop, and it’s not until his fourth and fifth lives that he meets others––called kalachakra––who also experience the same infinite cycle of birth and rebirth. (8)Īs one might guess from the title, Harry’s second life is followed by a third, again with the exact same origins but all the memories from his previous two lives.
Having no idea what might have caused this bizarre state of affairs, Harry descends into a “rather clichéd madness”:Īs the full powers of my adult consciousness returned to my child’s body, I fell first into a confusion, then an agony, then a doubt, then a despair, then a screaming, then a shrieking, and finally, aged seven years old, I was committed to St Margot’s Asylum for Unfortunates, where I frankly believed myself to belong, and within six months of my confinement succeeded in throwing myself out of a window on the third floor. But instead of entering an afterlife or the inky blackness of nonexistence, he finds himself reborn in exactly the same time and place as his original birth, only with all of the memories from his previous life intact. Harry August is born a British citizen in 1919, lives an undistinguished life as a groundskeeper, and dies seventy years later. Claire North’s The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August is the fantastical tale of a man with a peculiar affliction––or a gift, depending on your point of view.
0 kommentar(er)
