Jason Pettus's Reviews > The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August

2023 reads, #70. This is one of those books that's been on my to-read list for so long, I had forgotten who the person actually is and why I put the book on my list in the first place; and that's always an exciting moment for me as a heavy reader, because it means I can go into the book with completely innocent eyes, knowing not even the tiniest thing about it other than that at some point in the past, there was something about it that made me want to read it. That turned out to be especially good in this case, because this is a science-fiction novel light on action but heavy on ideas, so going into it with no pre-knowledge of the plot was delightful in the same way that going into a Christopher Nolan movie with this little pre-knowledge is.

And indeed, at a certain point I actually had to look up the date this novel was published (2014, it turns out), so that I could make sure it actually came before Nolan's 2020 movie Tenet; for while the storylines themselves are vastly different, they're both fundamentally based around the idea of a time-travel cold war, and very specifically the idea of an apocalyptic event happening at some unidentified point in the future, and those future madmen sending people back to the past to ensure that the apocalyptic weapon actually gets invented. As you can guess, our narrator is the Harry August of the book's title, a lower-class rural Brit who is born in the 1920s, lives an unremarkable life, and dies in the 1990s; it's only when he turns five in his next life and all his memories come flooding back does he realize that he's now living his entire 70-year life all over again, seemingly as a re-do completely from scratch.

Author Catherine Webb (writing here under the penname "Claire North") smartly has August go through the exact kinds of emotional cycles you would expect someone living the same long life over and over to go through: in his second life, August quickly comes to believe he's insane, and kills himself as a teenager; in his third life, realizing that he's not insane, he instead turns to a life of science to see if he can discover the answer behind his reincarnation mystery; when that fails, he then spends his fourth life devoted to understanding all the world's religions, just to wake up in his fifth life realizing that that didn't provide any answers either. Eventually he discovers (through very clever, byzantine plotting and writing, the kind that will deeply appeal to fans of books like Susanna Clarke's Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell) that there's actually a whole group of humans who suffer from the same problem as him, and that over the thousands upon thousands of Earth timelines that have occurred over and over they've managed to create a secret organization of sorts called the Cronos Club, where they do things like help "rescue" newly refreshed "ouroborans" (as they call themselves) when they become old enough to remember all their previous memories but are still too young to do something like hold a job or get away from their biological parents. (In one of the dozen extremely clever limits Webb puts on her fantastical conceit here, in order to keep the stakes high, ouroborans only have their previous memories resurface in the year between being five and six years old; so if they happen to get killed before they're five, they wake up in the next life with no previous memories at all, basically wiping them back into amnesiacs.)

It's here where Webb really earns her book's bona fides as a truly captivating and extremely unique sci-fi thriller, for because of the way these reincarnations work, you can effectively influence what will happen in the far past even though none of these people are technically time-traveling. Imagine our hero, for example, who dies in each existence of cancer in the 1990s; then in his next life, when he regains his memories of the '90s way back in 1925, he can seek out another ouroboran who's currently in their seventies themselves (i.e. was born back in 1850s) and tell them, "Here's everything that happens in the 1990s," information that they themselves can now take back with them in their own reincarnation. Then at that point, they themselves can seek out an elderly ouroboran (i.e. born in the 1780s) when they're a six-year-old in the 1850s, and tell them, "Oh, by the way, here's everything that happens way in the future in the 1990s." This is both a head-spinning concept and easy to understand, and Webb gets a lot of mileage out of it, in one example explaining that through this process, the Cronos Club has determined that the oldest of their kind seem to have first started showing up in ancient Babylon around the year 3000 BC, and that it seems to be roughly one out of every half-billion people who are born with the trait. (She also employs lots of funny Harry Potter-style sly humor when it comes to this subject, such as the stone obelisk the Babylonian ouroborans leave in the desert for future Cronos Club members to find, but how in some of these existences, this backwards grapevine convinces the Babylonians to sometimes leave dirty in-jokes for club members in the 20th century.)

Of course, with me mentioning Tenet, fans of that movie will easily see what the main conflict is here in this book, written six years before it -- namely, the ouroborans all know that at some point in the far future, the human race will genocide itself using an apocalyptic weapon, but with each new existence this apocalyptic event is getting closer and closer to our own times, with it first being around the year 2400, then in the next existence it suddenly jumping to 2350, then in the next existence after that it jumping again to the year 2300. I'll let the answers to who is doing this and why remain a surprise (although it's not difficult to guess, once you're introduced to the book's entire cast of characters); but the important part here is that, like Tenet, the book's main pleasure in the second half becomes that of the extremely clever and well-plotted temporal cold war Webb creates, in which one side is constantly attempting to send information about future technology back to the past, and the other side is constantly trying to stop them, but without any of them able to just explode into open warfare because then all the normal humans (or as they're called in this book, the "linears") will declare all of them monsters and wipe out the entire Cronos Club for good (which indeed actually happens in some of the 15 existences we watch here of our titular hero).

It's all just extremely, extremely well done, and this is for sure going to be going on my list of Top 10 Reads of 2023 at the end of the year; and so how additionally astonishing to learn afterwards, when finally reading up on Webb and her oeuvre, that the entire reason I did end up putting her on my to-read list in the first place is that she managed the flabbergasting feat of getting her first book published by a mainstream press and it becoming a bestseller when she was only 14 years old. (Of course, it helps that her dad is a veteran in the publishing industry who basically sent her manuscript to an agent buddy of his, but still.) Only 37 as of the writing of this review, she already has an amazingly prolific 23 published books under her belt, and her sci-fi titles under her Claire North name have either won or been finalists for the Arthur C. Clarke Award, the World Fantasy Award, the BSFA Award and the John W. Campbell Award. (She also writes adult fantasy novels under the nom de plume "Kate Griffin," and Young Adult novels under her real name.) In fact, it was during this post-read research that I remembered that it was actually another book of hers entirely that first got me interested in her, the more recent 2021 Notes from a Burning Age, so I'm sure I'll be getting to that one soon as well, since I ended up enjoying this one so incredibly much. I'll be sharing my review of that a little later this winter; but for now, sci-fi fans should for sure not walk but run to your local library to pick up a copy of this, both a trippy and an accessible genre novel of high ideas that will scratch the itch of a whole variety of different kinds of readers.