This was the July book for my local library’s book club. I must say that I have been impressed with other books they have read. They are not always books in my sphere of reading. Blake Crouch is one of those authors that wasn’t on my radar. But maybe he should be. Let me give you a Sneak Critique of Blake Crouch’s Recursion.
Summary
Recursion is a time travel book centered around memory as the vehicle to transport consciousness back in time. Helena is a scientist working on memory mapping and playback. A mysterious philanthropist, Marcus Slade, approaches her with a job offer she can’t refuse. Amazing pay, resources, and control over her project lure Helena into creating a memory chair that takes mapped memories and plays them back inside the user’s brain. With one simple additional element, the user can be transported back in time to the events of that memory. That element is the ultimate price; death.
Barry is an NYPD detective investigating a case of a woman threatening to jump off a building. She has false memories that plague her. After she kills herself, Barry goes in search of the man she claims she is married to. While investigating her story off the books, Barry gets taken captive by a shadowy figure who forces him back in time to the day his daughter died in a hit-and-run.
Eventually, Barry and Helena meet, The world ends a few times, and Helena and Barry spend over two hundred years together trying to find a way to stop the destruction of the world caused by the memory chair’s knowledge.
What Worked
Can I say everything? Yeah, I think I can say that. The pacing is fantastic. Blake covers so much and it doesn’t ever feel to me like it lags or slows down. I devoured this over two or three nights after I started it. It flows so well. And he achieves this pacing because of something else I noticed.
The descriptions in this book are very well done. He picks a few key details and gets very specific with them. This clarity of descriptions grounds us instantly and allows for the action to continue without getting bogged down in a mire of verbosity. But not all descriptions are paced at lightning speed. He has a great understanding of when to push forward and when to slow down. I am just enamored with the writing in this novel and want my writing to approach this level.
Because this is a Sneak Critique, I won’t gush much longer. But this book is excellent. Not only is Blake doing some great craft work, but he also has one of the best grasps on time travel I have ever read. He appears to understand it so well that I believe this is how time travel would work in reality. Well done, sir.
What Didn’t Work
I want there to be nothing, but I do have one thing.
In the two hundred-plus years that Barry and Helena are trying to solve this problem of stopping the end of the world, Helena is the person going back in time. She meets up with Barry over and over again and they work for thirty years at a time to try and stop the catastrophe. Not once does it cross their minds that Barry should go back after Helena did in the last loop. The effect of this would be that she knows what happens from her previous loop and he knows what happens from her current one. This would have taken some of the pressure off Helena to keep killing herself, and I don’t understand why Barry never suggests it.
Oh, and kind of related to that. Why are they always so far away from the chair when the world ends? I get it the first time, but every time after just makes me see them as reckless. Stay near the chair when you know the bombs are going to go off. Don’t be miles away, come on.
Conclusion
I loved Recursion. It is now one of my favorites. The writing is spot on for where I want to get to as a writer. The story is excellent. And I think Blake Crouch must have studied time travel at the graduate level because he hit the nail on the head with his understanding. Worth every penny.
