WARNING: There are 'spoilers' in this review.



This is possibly the dullest book I've ever read. I suppose that deserves credit of some sort. Like ‘The House of the Seven Gables’, the author excelled at making me feel so claustrophobic and trapped in a realm of endless tedium that I related to the narrator’s disgust with life after suffering through just fifty pages. That’s not the mark of a good story, though.



The 'plot', if you will (and if I sound like I'm speaking in a pretentious poncy way, it

WARNING: There are 'spoilers' in this review.



This is possibly the dullest book I've ever read. I suppose that deserves credit of some sort. Like ‘The House of the Seven Gables’, the author excelled at making me feel so claustrophobic and trapped in a realm of endless tedium that I related to the narrator’s disgust with life after suffering through just fifty pages. That’s not the mark of a good story, though.



The 'plot', if you will (and if I sound like I'm speaking in a pretentious poncy way, it's because I've been infected by the style in which this narrative was composed...ahem):



Harry (the narrator) is one of many who live their natural life, only to find that following death, they are reborn in the same life, to start all over again. Most people with this condition can't remember details of their previous lives when they're reborn. Harry is one of the rare few who remember 'everything'. He is labelled a 'mnemonic'. Why does this fail so spectacularly as a plot device? Because they also repeat ad infinitum that no matter what you do in each successive life, 'you cannot change anything'. It even says on the back of the book, 'Nothing ever changes,' and, '...he tries to save a past he cannot change....' However, if you alone remember your previous lifetimes, you are a wild card. You are going to start influencing your environment / the people around you / the events that occur. It is not possible for everything to be exactly the same. Things WILL change - potentially quite big things. Think of the butterfly effect. At the very least, you yourself will change dramatically. This story simply does not work.



Now, before I go on, I would like to address certain comments on this review, saying I'm listing 'supposed' plot holes and simply didn't understand the book. Let's examine the most obvious plot hole of all: the entire premise. So, you live maybe 80 years, die, and you're reborn...into the same family, the same life, and you remember everything. This means you have to redo all of infancy, childhood and adolescence knowing you lived before and anticipating every event. Think about the title of the book - this happens to you at least 15 times over. That's a minimum of 280 years spent growing up, over and over again. How frustrated would you be?



Overall, you would have lived maybe 1,200 years. That's 1,200 years of witnessing the same events, meeting the same people, being forced to do the same things, hearing the same 'news', etc. This would send you crazy. There'd be no excitement anymore. Music, films, etc. would never be new again. Politics would have no meaning. You'd have to get to know people again and again, even though you already know them. You'd never fall in love for the first time again, unless you sought other people and abandoned your whole childhood set-up, again and again. Death would lose all significance, because you'd know you'd see everyone again. Your own death would be meaningless, because you'd expect to be reborn. The back of the book says this story is 'totally original'. It's not - it's 'Groundhog Day' over a longer timescale.



So, what would you do? What would you do if you were being treated like a 3-year-old but could remember being 80? You'd definitely start rebelling and doing whatever you liked. With time, I expect you'd possibly start dabbling in suicide, or maybe even murder. You'd be skydiving and potholing and taking up all kinds of other dangerous activities. You'd pursue a different career path in every life, to try to mix it up. It would be hell and you would be doing absolutely everything you could to make the best of it, to stay sane - but I don't think you'd succeed.



I'll tell you what you would NOT do: spend every boring life sitting around in someone's living room talking about politics - which is pretty much what Harry does through this whole book. Remember, if we take this premise seriously, he's doing 1,200 years of this - 1,200 years of tirade after endless boring pointless mind-numbing agonising soul-destroying pretentious tirade about things like communism - as if ANY of this is new and interesting and insightful in 2015 - and what does it matter, if you can't change anything anyway? You're just going to die and end up back in the same political climate with no evolution. How do you even know the future exists? This is how you would likely start to think, if this were real. Moreover, the political ideas she promotes in this book actually offended and angered me. They showed so little regard for the victims of history that I was disgusted.



I suppose the point is that I came away from this book thinking the author doesn't understand people and basic human psychology / behaviour. This was reinforced by the fact that I had to keep reminding myself the narrator was meant to be a man. He sounded so like a woman, to me. He was not convincing at all.



There is also zero characterisation in this book. Even the narrator - I can't tell you a thing about him. He's the most soulless character ever thought up. He has all this time to think and grow and develop as a human being and he does none of that. He just stands in dreary stuffy rooms drinking whiskey and speculating that life is meaningless. At one point, he says he loved a woman named Jenny and she put him in an institution because she thought he was mad when he told her he knew the future. She's never mentioned again for 300 pages. Finally, it turns out she's married to Vincent. Harry says he's heartbroken, and…I’ve pretty much worded it the way the book did. That’s as deep as it gets. I also found it incredible that every character happened to be brilliant at quantum physics. Isn't that convenient?



Everyone was an elitist middle-class snob, as well - and there were a LOT of them: there was a new character in every single chapter – I don't think anyone but Vincent was ever seen again in future chapters. There was no one to hold onto. And when I say chapters, I mean segments of 1-3 pages. That's how long every chapter was, and they all went nowhere. They just dropped off into nothing. Turn the page - scene over - characters gone - why did I read it?



This is without even touching on the attempted sci-fi elements to the novel that are not thought through or explained at all. For example, Vincent says he's inventing a machine called a 'quantum mirror' that will allow you to realise you're actually God. That's about all the explanation we're given. There's no visual description. There's no science. There's no philosophical insight. There's no...ANYTHING. I must have read that section ten times before I was willing to accept that the author didn't bother to think this idea through. It isn't even an idea; it's an idea of an idea.



A lot of other reviewers here said the science and philosophy went over their heads. No, it didn't. The ideas presented in this book are actually very basic; the author rehashed a bundle of clichéd pop-science without much original insight. The reason these concepts confused other reviewers is that they're so badly 'explained' it's clear the author herself doesn't know what she's talking about. They didn't relate to anything else that was going on, either.



What bothers me most is that this book was promoted as a time travel story. It's NOT A TIME TRAVEL STORY. He repeats his life over and over again. He's not jumping back and forth through time. Yet the author decided to write it as if he did, so you had no idea what was going on. Back and forth, back and forth - the only reason I can think of for her doing this is to disguise the fact that nothing happened.



I also have to note that it speaks volumes that all the fans who take the time to comment on my review are hostile, nasty and think it's appropriate to make personal attacks on me without having met me. You're welcome to your opinions, but I'm deleting any abusive comments - not because my OPINIONS are 'wrong' or I'm 'too stupid to know how to read' (honestly, someone has thought it okay to say that). Those are the types of people driven to defend this novel - just another reason I HATE this book.