Recursion

I just finished listening to Recursion for the second time on Audible and, fuck… what a trippy book.

I thought I’d re-listen to the book and review it because of all the time I’ve already put into Dark Matter. But, if I’m being honest, Recursion is the much better book. Blake Crouch is a good writer in the sense that he doesn’t pollute his stories with too many characters that don’t matter. Instead, based on the half-dozen books of his that I’ve read, I’d say he’s a master at nailing down a few characters and how they interact.

And, as any writer will tell you, a good story is really just taking a few well developed characters and throwing them into a room with a problem. That problem could be a multi-dimensional time travel device, or it could be a town that seems to operate solely on fear. But it’s how those characters resolve the problem that makes for a good book.

Recursion is fun because, until the very last page, the reader is never sure exactly where it’s going or where it will end up. In fact, the fun thing about the book isn’t the way that it ended. It’s that it maybe never needed to end at all. As the book explored various time oddities and possibilities, had Crouch wanted to turn this book into a series, there were enough threads left that he could have. But, that then would have risked staying too long at the party, and no one wants that.

The book centers around two main characters, Barry Sutton, an NYPD detective who is forced into the events of the story against his will and Helena Smith, a neuroscientist who accidentally ends the world by inventing a memory chair.

For the first half if not two-thirds of the book, the two characters never meet, Helena first inventing her memory chair at the behest of an enigmatic billionaire and then seeing what the repercussions of it are while setting out to destroy it. Or at least make sure it never gets invented again. Barry, meanwhile, responds to the call of a potential jumper on top of a building. She’s distraught because the life she remembers, the one where she was happy, is gone. She remembers it clearly and, yet, that’s not her life, right then. She’s suffering from a new malady people have taken to calling False Memory Syndrome, when people remember something that never happened.

As Barry investigates, he winds up finding out more than he’d bargained for. Not just discovering that was causing the False Memory Syndrome but being sent back in time to the night his daughter was killed in a hit-and-run with the message that he should live his life better. This time. But what happens when you catch back up to the time you were sent back from? And that’s when the story really shifts into overdrive.

At first it seems like Recursion might just be another time travel novel where some people use it for good to improve themselves (and save their daughter) while others want to use it for personal gain and still more see it for the apocalyptic technology it is. But this book is far, far more than that because, as the name suggests, this story doesn’t run in a straight line. And as the plot loops and curls in on itself it becomes apparent that the reader is being given almost exactly the same experience as the characters.

The audio book is also well produced. Segments from Barry’s and Helena’s perspectives each have their own narrator, a man and a woman respectively. It’s a risky move as some listeners prefer a single, steady narration, and should one narrator do a better job than the other, it could spoil the sections with the weaker reader. But, here, it’s a gamble that paid off. Both narrators do an excellent job and I didn’t find myself preferring one or the other. But it was a nice signal as to whose part of the story is going to be told.

It’s a beautifully written book that has shades of Dark Matter but is much, much more complex in terms of its plot and, by the end, it pays off in spades, rewarding the whole journey while not overstaying its welcome.

I can’t recommend this book enough.