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| Novelist, screenwriter, and show runner |
Recursion is the second novel I've read by Blake Crouch. The first was Dark Matter (2016), a race-to-the finish thriller involving the many worlds hypothesis of quantum mechanics. In the earlier novel, a professor of physics is kidnapped and thrown into a device that shifts him into a parallel universe. Who did this to him and how to get back to his own life are just a few of the problems he must solve. It may sound a bit cerebral, but Dark Matter was actually quite a fun read; I understand it's soon to be a streaming series from Apple TV+.
Review
Recursion is built upon a similar premise. The story opens with a detective named Barry Sutton who, in 2018, tries to talk a potential jumper down from a ledge. She's suffering from a recent phenomenon called False Memory Syndrome (FMS), in which people confusingly recall whole chunks of their lives that they never lived. Barry is unsuccessful, but he becomes obsessed with understanding why the woman did what she did. His detective work eventually leads him to the source.
In alternating chapters we meet a researcher named Helena Smith who, in 2007, driven by her mother's worsening condition, is trying to develop a method to reverse the effects of Alzheimer's disease. She is working on a way to record memories and then restimulate those memories in the brain. She is, unfortunately, getting nowhere fast until an eccentric tech billionaire steps in and offers to fund her research at a level she never dreamed of on the condition that she agrees to work with his team in complete secrecy.
Based on that description, you can probably imagine how the two storylines begin to come together. But there's a twist, and, if you're intrigued, I'd strongly suggest you skip the rest of my review and go read the novel.
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Helena's Elon-like benefactor, Marcus Slade, helicopters her out to an abandoned oil rig off the coast of northern California that he has retrofitted into a state-of-the-art laboratory exclusively for her use. With an unlimited equipment budget and a team of assistants, Helena's research proceeds by leaps and bounds until it hits a wall that Marcus insists can only be overcome by having a human subject's heart stopped at the moment the memory transfer takes place. This is an insane-sounding notion that neither Helena nor most of the assistants will go along with, but Marcus eventually gets his way. And that's when something unfathomable happens. Helena realizes that when the subject died during the transfer, the device didn't just restore a memory, it literally sent the subject back in time to the point at which the remembered event first occurred. (A bunch of clever hand-waving makes this sound semi-plausible.)
How did Marcus know this would happen? Well, this isn't Marcus' first rodeo. As a research subject, he died in the device once himself; he just needed to get back to the point where the device gets invented again for the first time, and living through history a second time gives a person the chance to make a lot of smart investments along the way.
As he takes control of the device, Marcus begins to propagate its use among people who have strong regrets about their past. But here's the catch -- and I've never seen anyone apply this to a time-travel story before -- when you change the past, you still remember your old life, and all the people whose lives are affected by the changes also remember their other lives. Those FMS memories aren't false at all. The more people use the device, the wider the circles of overlaid memories become, and the deeper the layers of memories become. Affected people don't remember their other lives, though, until they reach the day in history when the recursions first began; then all the memories come flooding back. For everyone.
As Barry and Helena's lives become intertwined, they set out to find a way to stop the Armageddon that occurs when hostile nations realize the reality disruption is coming from the United States and fire nuclear warheads to stop it. The title Recursion becomes even more relevant as Helena goes back to a starting point before the device was invented and tries again and again with Barry's help to stop everyone's memories of all the alternate timelines from hitting them when they reach the day that it began. It is a seemingly hopeless quest, and as Helena fails again and again, dies again and again, meets and recruits Barry again and again, reliving hundreds of years, her mind begins to fail.
Admittedly, the novel slows down a bit with the repeated attempts, but Crouch is too good a writer to wear out the reader's patience. He also uses the repetition and the way Barry and Helena experience the passage of time differently to meditate on relationships. Crouch isn't so focused on the twists and turns of his temporal thriller that he doesn't take time to explore the human dimension. I look forward to reading his next one.
