Many theories have been offered on the birth and death of the universe, but I’m convinced that the strangest by far is the notion of eternal recurrence, central to the philosophy of Nietzsche. On this hypothesis, when the world ends, it starts up again, and the same events will occur over and over—your first date, the Ali-Frazier fight, Geraldo opening Al Capone’s vault. We are all just reruns in unending syndication.
I’m hardly surprised that this notion has found its greatest traction in the realm of the absurd. In the movie Groundhog Day , Bill Murray finds himself caught in some inexplicable time warp, living the same day over and over. But almost every comedy has a dose of Groundhog Day in its conception: the very notion of a running gag—that staple of comedy films and TV shows since the birth of film—relies upon the intrinsically ridiculous notion of recurrence as pattern-creating force. Yet other idioms also share in the absurdity. Think of that that goofy M.C. Escher drawing that your roommate put up in dorm room of the handing drawing another hand that is also drawing the first hand. And then there’s Calvino’s If On a Winter’s Night a Traveler , or Michael Frayn's Noises Off or any number of short stories by Borges . The notion is both compelling and ridiculous, the loopiness of loops, and for that very reason will recur eternally as evidence of its own self-validating illogic.
But there’s nothing comic or absurd about the eternal recurrence at the heart of Claire North’s extraordinary 2014 novel The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August . Our protagonist is forced to lead his life over and over again, and not for laughs. Harry August is orphaned from birth, losing both his biological mother and the soon after the woman who adopted him. He never has a real father figure to look after him, even after fifteen lives—the closest male in his world is actually his nemesis Vincent Rankis, another soul caught in the cycle of recurrence. Yet this is the father figure he may need to kill, not just to establish an independent self or work out an Oedipal complex, but for sake of the future.
It's not a good sign when your closest friend murders you twice. Or steals your wife from a previous life. Even worse, Vincent’s super-villain program to accelerate technological progress—drawing on learnings from previous lives—threatens to bring about the end of the world. Harry is tempted to join in the quest to advance scientific learning, and potentially grasp truths hitherto hidden from human understanding. But he also wants to save humanity, and get a dose of revenge.
Perhaps this sounds like a cross between a James Bond movie and the Upanishads. To her credit, North manages to succeed both as a storyteller attuned, to the pacing and action required for success in genre fiction, and also as a thoughtful guide to the many philosophical issues raised in the course of her novel. I could even see assigning this book in social theory or political science classes. I frequently felt, while reading The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August, that it provided a very vivid case study in support of philosopher Sir Karl Popper’s concept of piecemeal social engineering in his 1957 book The Poverty of Historicism . Popper contrasted this cautious, step-by-step approach with the inferior (in his opinion) holistic social engineering—the latter, he claimed, was doomed to failure because it underestimated the difficulty of managing change in too many different variables at the same time. In North’s novel, the protagonist August is a Popperian with Aristotelian leanings, while his adversary Rankis is an anti-Popperian with a Platonist bent. In life after life, they pursue their opposed visions, and the readers are in a position to compare and contrast the results.
Other sections of the novel look at key questions relating to religion, ethics, free will, technology, psychology, alternative universe theory, and penology. But these are never addressed in a heavy-handed or doctrinaire manner. Every theoretical issue is integrated into the story, and illuminated by telling incidents—sometimes even with the benefit of trial-and-error. The first life can serve as a control group for subsequent experimentation.
Harry August is a member of the Chronos Club, a tiny group of individuals who live their lives over and over again—in contrast to the vast majority of people, ‘linears’ in the language of the novel, who only have one life to lead. Chronos Club members take a vow of non-interference in the major geopolitical events of their lifetimes. They don’t try to avert wars of assassinate tyrants. They have learned that there are too many unintended consequences of such maneuvers. "Complexity should be your excuse for inaction," August tells the maniacal US government agent who wants to use eternal recurrence to help 'good guys' defeat 'bad guys'. Our villain Rankis, in contrast, refuses to join the Chronos Club, and is determined to change the course of history by informing scientists of future breakthroughs decades in advance.
With each new life, Rankis manages to make greater and greater changes. Through his machinations, consumers have personal computers, email and the Internet in the 1960s, but also hackers and ransomware. Color television and jet engines now show up in the first half of the twentieth century, along with other innovations, but environmental disasters and pollution ramp up in tandem with these advances. Weaponry gets more sophisticated, but leads to ever more deadly conflicts. But it’s easy to ignore these problems when you have more lives to lead, and can always fix the mistakes of this attempt when you get your next fresh start. It’s a pity the rest of the human race doesn't get those same fresh resets on their afflicted world.
This book is very readable, but I don’t minimize the difficulty North faced in managing the flashbacks and anticipations required when presenting a biography that repeats itself fifteen times. Perhaps the greatest sign of our author’s skill is how easily she covers the thousand years during which her story transpires, without getting snagged by the inevitable repetitions or bogged down by the sheer weight of a millennium of world history.
I still find the notion of eternal recurrence implausible. But Claire North has convinced me that it’s no Groundhog Day joke. Instead of chuckling at absurdist running gags, readers may even find themselves wondering about a very serious question: What would they do differently if they could choose all over again? And then there’s the even deeper question: If you were put in that situation, would it be a blessing or a curse. There’s a bit of both in this thought-provoking novel, which I recommend you read in this life, because who knows if you’ll get another chance in the next one?
Ted Gioia writes on music, literature and popular culture. He is the author of ten books. His most recent book is How to Listen to Jazz (Basic Books).