The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August by Claire North

 

Catherine Webb was born into the publishing business

What sets the time-loop story apart from the time-travel story is that in the time loop you don't go anywhere -- you're stuck on a hamster wheel of days. But, unlike the movie Groundhog Day or the streaming series Palm Springs, in which the protagonists live the same day again and again, Harry August lives an entire lifetime over and over. It can get exhausting.

Review

Harry's first life began a couple of months after the end of World War I, on New Year's Eve, 1918. The circumstances of Harry's birth were inauspicious. His mother, a servant to the upper-class Hulne household, had been raped by the scion to the family fortune before he went off to war. Expelled from the estate when she was found to be pregnant, Harry's mother later died in childbirth in the toilet of a train station. To avoid a potential family scandal when the dead mother's identity was learned, the Hulne's arranged for the boy to be raised by their groundskeeper Patrick August and his wife Harriet, as if he were possibly Patrick's.

Harry lived out his first life normally. He served in World War II and returned home to help with and eventually take up his adopted father's work on the Hulne estate. In time Harry died, as we all do, but was reborn in the train station and within a few years memories of his first life began to return. This was so traumatizing to the young Harry that he was put in a mental institution and committed suicide at a tender age.

Then he was born a third time, same train station, and eventually remembered his first two lives. In his third life, he dedicated his life to God but found no answers as to who or what he was.

Each time Harry was reborn, memories of his previous lives began to return around the age of three. Harry began to adapt, to use his precocious knowledge to excel in school and to better himself in life. But, in his fourth life, he made the mistake of confessing his reality to his wife Jenny, with the result that she had him committed to an asylum where he was drugged and restrained by a quack psychiatrist. While being held against his will in the institution, a spy named Phearson came to him and tried to get him to divulge knowledge of the future. Unlike everyone else, Phearson believed Harry's story and even revealed that he was aware of a secret society of people like Harry called the Cronus Club. "Like the Illuminati without the glamour, or the Masons without the cufflinks," he said.

This information allows Harry to eventually find a way to make contact with the Cronus Club. The Club's representative who visits him in the mental hospital where he is held prisoner lets him know that the only way out of his current dilemma is to commit suicide, which he does. In subsequent lives, Harry is able to reach out to the Club when his memories return, and these mysterious benefactors pave his way through the best schools, and so forth. They call themselves kalachakra, a Buddhist term that refers to cycles of time, and they keep in touch with each other via this shadowy worldwide organization that we now know is called the Cronus Club.

Throughout the book we learn that the guiding philosophy of the Cronus Club is, "Complexity should be your excuse for inaction." (This is also the guiding principle of classical conservatism, by the way.) The Club has a vested interest in maintaining the status quo through time. In extreme cases, when certain kalachakra have tried to severely alter the time line, it is possible to permanently eradicate that ouroboran's memory, or even to kill them before they are reborn (permanently ending their existence), as a means to restore the status quo. Members of the Cronus Club have found clever ways to pass messages back down through time to the past. When Harry is quietly dying his eleventh death, he learns from another kalachakra that a message has come from the future that the world is ending.

In his twelfth life, Harry sets out to discover who among his kind is so altering the timeline as to bring about the imminent future destruction of the world. His nemesis, Vincent Rankis, turns out to be quite formidable. It's only because Harry has one other special quality, which we've known about all along, that he is able to survive when other kalachakra are being wiped out wholesale.

Claire North, real name Catherine Webb, wrote her first published young-adult novel when she was only 14 years old. The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August was her first published adult novel. She was 28 when it came out, and it still feels a bit precocious because the novel spans quite a bit of history and ranges across Europe and Russia. It is necessarily a convoluted tale, as it takes place over fifteen lifetimes, but to North's credit the narrative is never confusing. The only thing I would criticize is that I never fully understood Rankis' motivation or exactly how his quantum mirror was going to end everything, but I suppose that was the mcguffin aspect of the novel. The appeal of the time-loop novel is that we all have thought about what it would be like to live portions of our lives over again knowing what we know now. North shows how that might be a "careful what you wish for" proposition.