In Claire North’s time travel novel, an immortal finds purpose

THERE is a peculiar obsession with death in us humans. We spend our good years ignoring its inevitability and as soon as the first bolt of arthritic lightening and spasm of back pain strikes, we begin mourning our short lives. Life, if you ask those at the tail end of it, is fleeting and we hardly get a chance to marvel at the wonders in front of us before we retrieve our blinders and once more begin climbing the ageing-ailment ladder.

Harry August however, now in his 11th life, doesn’t have this problem, and as he lies dying in a hospital bed in Berlin at 78 (for the 11th time), he is visited by an 11-year-old German schoolgirl, who calls him Dr August and informs him that the world is ending. As she checks his vitals and the medical equipment surrounding him with the self-assurance of a seasoned doctor, she asks him to pass the message to the club in his next life that the world is ending sooner and sooner in every succeeding timeline. Welcome to The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August.

Claire North’s novel posits that there are special kinds of people in the world, called kalachakras, or ourobans, who are reborn perpetually, on the same day to the same parents under the same circumstances, but with the freedom to change their lives endlessly. As they die in every life, they are born again with the memories of their earlier lives intact. These people (some of whom have been around for thousands of years), find their way to a secret society called the Cronus Club. A society, Harry our protagonist describes as being “like the Illuminati without the glamour, or the Masons without the cufflinks”.

The kalachakra undergo a quick initiation which comprises basically two rules and a few guidelines: do not bugger up temporal events, and do not harm another kalachakra; try to invest money with the Club so that in your next life, you don’t have to wade through the pain of elementary school yet again and can be taken care of by a benevolent benefactor; and do not tell anyone where and when you were born. That last rule, if broken, is the only way to make sure that the kalachakra are never born, thus, wiping out their existence.

The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August is a bit of a marvel. For one, it is written with imagination; the one audacious ingredient that can turn even the most humdrum premise into a whirlwind of adventure. North has played her cards very wisely — who wants to read about time travel again? Or even secret societies cloaked in some inexplicable immortality mojo? Not me. But then along comes this book with a completely unremarkable narrator who begins to tell of his first 15 lives in such earnest that the reader is hooked.

The story straddles two distinct genres: historical fiction and speculative fiction with both treated with equal aplomb. There is enough handholding with the speculative half to keep mainstream readers hooked but it is also an extended musing on the esoteric side of human nature with an absorbing narration. It is a masterful scrutiny of a human being who is subjected to something alien — immortality; and in doing so is transformed from an idiosyncratic, reactive, even decisive person into a stoic and detached shadow.

This shadow can only observe as the people he loved in a past life, live once again in his new life without any knowledge of his existence, or watch a war kill millions of people again without any interference from him. He can watch every single thing change, except his own current existence which of course he can play around with endlessly.

As Harry tells us, in his second life, he was so distraught with being born again that he threw himself out a window of a mental asylum at 14. In his third life, he tried to find God for his answers, and travelled endlessly, converting to Islam, Judaism, Buddhism, Christianity, and so on, but realised that God is a silent spectator, not unlike himself. He took on science in his next life, becoming a doctor of physics at 22 (he could have done it sooner but that would have looked suspicious), and so on.

In all of this he has an itch to make a real difference; to matter, to do something except wander through each life aimlessly: a longing that he shares with most people, no matter how mortal. Enter: Vincent Rankis. Rankis is, like Harry, also an ouroban. And like all immortals (Lord Voldemort comes to mind), Vincent wants to be god. He has immortality on his side already, but what Vincent would really like is to create a way to see the past and the future: to be all-knowing, all-powerful and so on. Harry and Vincent meet in one of Harry’s earlier lives, and find in each other kindred souls before even discovering that they share the kalachakra factor. There is a bit of bromance between them; even gay undertones and the two instantly click.

Vincent and Harry meet repeatedly in each life, becoming increasingly more like antagonists rather than friends. North explores this grey area between the rivals to great advantage, making it not so much an enmity but a very complex relationship between real friends and soul mates (if there is such a thing).

It is rare to find a work of speculative fiction which delves into the characters’ heads in such detail, but Harry August has achieved just that. It follows real, flawed people against a great, sprawling narrative that spans centuries, continents and milestones.

The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August

(NOVEL)

By Claire North

Orbit, UK

ISBN 978-0356502571

416pp.