CLAIRE NORTH The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August. Reviewed by Lou Murphy
The pseudonymous Claire North poses an esoteric and intellectual challenge in this historically based and convoluted time-travel story.
Born as a kalachakra, or ouroboran, Harry August belongs to a unique group of individuals to whom the usual laws of birth, life and death do not apply. Indeed, Harry August journeys through his lives in Groundhog-Day style, each of his deaths knelling the dawn of yet another birth in exactly the same time and place as that of his previous existence.
In the fourth repeat of his lifetime August is tortured by Franklin Phearson, a shady, clinical creature who wishes to capitalise on August’s ability to tell the future through the incremental ‘memories’ of his consecutive existences. Unable to escape from Phearson’s calculated interrogations, August is offered salvation in the form of membership of the exclusively ouroboran Cronus Club, an elite group of fellow kalachakra bonded by their defiance of the usual limits of human life.
On his 11th deathbed, he is visited by a seven-year-old girl with a message from the future, to be delivered to the Cronus Club:
‘The world is ending,’ she said. ‘The message has come down from child to adult, child to adult, passed back down the generations from a thousand years forward in time. The world is ending and we cannot prevent it. So now it’s up to you.’
Throughout time the Cronus Club has sought to preserve its own established spheres of power and has made its own rules, but when he discovers that the approach of the end of the world is ‘speeding up’, Harry August goes on the hunt for the person who can change the future:
‘In every life we lead, regardless of every death we pass,’ I said, ‘the world around us is unchanged. There is always rebellion in 1917; there is always war in 1939; Kennedy will always be shot and trains will always be late. These are linear events which do not vary, as far as we can observe, from life to life. The only variable factors are us. If the world is changing, we are the ones who change it.’
‘Against the rules of the Cronus Club!’ interrupted Charity furiously, never one to be distracted by the bigger picture.
‘The question therefore becomes.’ I went on, legs dangling from the chair on which I was perched, ‘Not why is the world ending. But who?’
August’s quest takes him to Russia in the early spring of 1956. Here, he reconnects with Vincent, a fellow time-traveller seeking answers to the questions of identity, meaning, and existence, and willing to break the rules of the Cronus Club to fulfill his own agenda. Together they attempt to create a universal theory of everything, and a team of Russian communist-era scientists is employed to meet their research needs. In pursuing this greater truth, August discusses his ideas with a Russian prostitute;
‘When I was young,’ I explained, ‘I looked to God to find answers. When God didn’t have anything, I looked for answers in people, but all they said was, ‘Relax, go with it.’
‘”Go with it”?’ She queried my American idiom, pronounced in German, using her native Russian.
‘Don’t fight against inevitability,’ I translated loosely. ‘Life is until it is not, so why get fussed? Don’t hurt anyone, try not to give your dinner guests food poisoning, be clean in word and deed – what else is there? Just be a decent person in a decent world.’
‘Everyone’s a decent person,’ she replied softly, ‘in their own eyes.’
Touching on tenets of Buddhist philosophy, Theosophy, and psychology, The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August is an interesting exercise in deciphering what is actually important about being human. When the usual laws of human existence have been discarded, what is left? What is real? What is sanity? The book reads like a literary mandala. Traditionally constructed out of grains of sand, the mandala depicts Buddhist deities in a portrayal of time; it is destroyed shortly after its completion to illustrate the Buddhist teaching of impermanence. North has created a vividly imagined historically-based fiction vehicle to explore this cosmology.
Claire North The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August Orbit 2014 PB 416pp $29.99
Lou Murphy is the author of the crime novel Squealer, available from http://www.smashwords.com/profile/view/LouMurphy
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