The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August by Claire North (5 stars)

Great read, I breezed through it over a couple of days. Time travel is one of my favourite subjects, and I liked the premise of being trapped constantly re-living the same life in the same body, but with memories carrying over after your death. Like Groundhog day, but for your whole life instead of one day.

What would you do if you had essentially infinite lives? What would matter to you? How would you value the lives of others who aren't like you (referred to as linear)?

North gives Harry plenty of opportunity to explore those questions. He discovers the "Cronus Club": an organization of kalachakras like himself that assists those who have been reborn as children with escaping the tedium of going through yet another childhood, and establishing some income and housing stability. A common view of those in the Chronus Club is that "complexity should be your excuse for inaction": the reasoning being that if you were to kill Hitler for example, how do you know that an even more effective leader with the same views wouldn't take his place, and possibly win World War Two? Through trying to influence the world in many ways the consensus of the Chronus Club is that the large historical events are largely fixed and mostly immune to change.

Given that WWII will always happen no matter what you do, how would you choose to live your life? Some escape to calmer countries during the war, some fully participate and revel in the unpredictability of war because it delivers new experiences each time.

Ironically, to give purpose to the lives of the Chronus Club members, some sort of mutual objective is desirable, and one materializes in the form of Vincent, our antagonist. Vincent's only real crime is chasing a macguffin, in this case a quantum mirror which will help him understand time and matter on a much deeper level. He pursues it with ruthless efficiency, killing those who get in his way, and with no care for how much he may be changing the course of history in the process. He perfects methods to create advanced technology faster than it was ever supposed to happen - delivering gift-wrapped inventions to the best scientists of the time. I've often wondered about this subject myself: given modern education, and the ability to time travel, how effective could a single person be at accelerating technological advancement? Vincent is certainly helped by having a photographic memory.

I loved the idea of handing messages forward and backwards through time by passing them young to old, old to young through the Chronus club. The implication received through these messages from the future is that technological advancement precipitates environmental collapse, and bringing forward the pace of that change, also brings forward the end of the world.

There's some logic holes that aren't really explained in the story: say Harry and Vincent are separated by 10 years at birth, but Harry dies at 20 and Vincent lives for another 50 years. If Harry is reborn and then Vincent is reborn 10 years later with all of his extra 50 years of memories, was Harry waiting in limbo for 50 years? Multiply that problem by thousands of kalachakras.

Spoilers.

The ending seems a little too easy. Vincent just gives up his point of origin for no good reason. I didn't buy Harry's strategy of talking to him about his own childhood in an effort to get Vincent to divulge his, Vincent guarded that secret as his most prized possession for hundreds of years. Also I didn't buy that Harry wouldn't slip up over several decades of working closely with Vincent. It would have happened somehow, some bit of knowledge would have peeked through. Harry's very long-game strategy just wouldn't have worked. I especially don't think he could have maintained composure through the Jenny incident.

Overall though, spectacular read.

5 stars.

Who fears death by Nnedi Okorafor (3 stars)

Coming off the Binti series underwhelmed I wasn't sure I should dive into another Okorafor book, but I was intrigued because HBO had bought the options on it as a series with George RR Martin as the executive producer. Minor spoilers ahead

Okorafor sets out to tackle some heavy subjects: rape, female circumcision, colourism, racism, sexism, and ethnic cleansing. She succeeds in showing us what it would be like to be pressured by society and tradition into circumcision, what it would be like to be the child of rape where your very skin colour screams to everyone that you were a child of rape. Just your skin colour makes you an outcast, constantly reviled and hated. Sadly, this is based on true events in Sudan:

The Nuru men, and their women, had done what they did for more than torture and shame. They wanted to create Ewu children. Such children are not children of the forbidden love between a Nuru and an Okeke, nor are they Noahs, Okekes born without color. The Ewu are children of violence.

The female circumcision where they mutilate young healthy girls is also barbaric:

“The scalpel that they use is treated by Aro. There’s juju on it that makes it so that a woman feels pain whenever she is too aroused . . . until she’s married.”

Onyesonwu obviously has magical talents, but sexism prevents her from receiving any proper tuition despite her life being under threat in the magical world "the wilderness" from her biological father, rapist, and powerful sorcerer.

This is all heavy, heavy stuff, but it is dealt with in well crafted storytelling...for a while. But soon I found the story stalling. I expected to get a sorcery training montage, but didn't. All of Onyesonwu's 'training' was mostly just starving her, throwing her into a deadly situation and seeing if she could figure out what to do instinctively. Somehow this makes her incredibly powerful, by her own account. That's unconventional, but OK.

I also expected to get more deep character development, but didn't. Even Mwita, the second most important character, is basically just a skin colour (also Ewu) who is in love with Onyesonwu. The girls who go through the circumcision with Onyesonwu become her friends, but are almost entirely defined by wanting the circumcisions undone so they can have sex. We know very little else about them except Luyu is probably the prettiest.

Sex is had and talked about constantly as the group of friends start their voyage, but there aren't actual sex scenes, just lots of talk about hearing people have sex in other tents. Its repetitive and boring.

After reading a number of Okorafor books, I think the lack of character development outside the main character is a pattern. There's no secondary point of view, and everyone else is a cutout. The villain nemesis in this story is crudely drawn as a pure evil rapist sorcerer:

“Some people are just born evil,”

Real villains are much more complex. What was his motivation for these terrible acts? We don't know.

The ending was essentially what I expected, although with a decent twist, i.e. Onyesonwu doesn't know what to do, acts instinctively using her enormous powers, and saves the day.

It may be possible to make a decent TV series out of this, although it will definitely be hard to watch due to all the violence. It is largely experienced second-hand in the book, but I assume you'll get that first hand on the screen.

The strength of the novel is the real-world hardships and Onyesonwu coming of age in a world where she is beset by multiple -isms. The fantasy/magic side of it is very weak.

3 stars.