I’ve read a few books that seem to dwell on the theme of doing a life over again. I think it might be one of the most common daydreams available – all you have to do to achieve it is live long enough to have some regrets, and you will likely get there before you reach your teen years. Of course, it escalates with age, and it is something that we get back to pretty common.
I guess what was surprising about this was that so far out of two books I have read by Crouch, both of them have touched on this. I don’t want to make any assumptions about the author, but if one more book touches on the same theme I will start to suspect that he likely has some deep-seated regrets. He might have a biography worth reading in the future. But if you want to have an idea what this is all about, here is a quote I think get’s the point across:
“…I’ve lived more lifetimes than you can possibly fathom.”
“Doing what?” she asked.
“Most of them were quiet explorations of who I am, who I could be, in different places, with different people. Some were…louder….”
We try to live our lives, believing as much as possible in the dominance of our own agency, despite the fact that life will always just get in our fucking way. How much more of ourselves could we explore if we could do it again, ignoring the future history that is constantly coming. We could try different attitiudes and personalities, different people and places. If we could get time to repeat itself, with us keep our foreknowledge, time as a force of attrition becomes irrelevant.
This book distinguishes itself from Dark Matter in the plot. I had major issues with the sci-fi McGuffin used to propel the plot forward – I don’t think I have ever so often had to put my head into my hands and utter “no no, that’s not how anything fucking works” since reading China Mieiville’s Embassytown, and I have to confess that I thought the book was going to end a lot sooner than it did (I have a pirated copy of this, and sometimes the page percentage is off or inaccurate. I thought this book was going to end at the 50% mark). I was wrong, and I was happy to be wrong. Crouch did a really good job amping up the stakes of it all in the second half of the book. The plot gets, in my assessment, delightfully fucking nuts towards the end. Although, reading it I do find myself suspecting that Crouch really writes a lot with the hopes of a TV show or movie deal. Some of the scenes really felt like he was writing them to ultimately get this on a screen. Well, it looks like that gambit paid off.
Interesting linguistic point: languages change with time, but as well with the technology that surrounds our life. Our experiences inform our writing, and sometimes this experience will cloud the reading for a potential member of the audience. Here is a quote from the book that my father, alive and breathing as of this writing, and a native speaker of the English language, would not at all be able to work out:
She takes it from him, sits down in one of the arm chairs, and opens the blade.
“What are you doing?” he asks.
“Making a save point.”
The throw away comment, who likely would be able to have understood everything else in the novel so far, had never played a video game in his life. He has no conception of what a save point is. Nor does this book have any other video game-esque allusions, although there is something video game-y to the way some of the action unfolds.
This book is in the category of popcorn reading, and I find the crouch is a less interesting Daniel Suarez. I’ll keep reading his books, probably, because they keep coming up and they are a nice getaway from the more challenging things I am reading. But part of my brain recognizes that these books, like the aforementioned popcorn, probably aren’t great for me.
Failures in Polymathy 