Replay
Only one review this time, sorry. There was also an Agatha Christie book, but I don't have anything in particular to say about Agatha Christie yet, except that she never shrinks from making every character possibly the murderer. Sometimes this bugs me and makes it hard to get into the book because I'm holding off from liking any of the characters since they might turn out to be Evil, but more often it ensures the ending's a surprise, and counteracts the fundamental social conservatism of mystery novels to some extent. So yeah. Anyway (this review also contains spoilers for the movie Groundhog Day, btw):


Replay (Ken Grimwood): I came into this with an odd set of expectations -- a couple strong recommendations, a couple disrecommendations (although I can't say Adam disliking something says much about it, unless it's delicious Life cereal), and a blurb somewhere that said it was like Groundhog Day. Now, inky completists know that I am fond of that movie, so on the whole I was looking forward to it. After reading Replay, I am still up on it, but, in fact, it's nothing at all like Groundhog Day.

Well, ok, it's got a time loop in it. But whereas in Groundhog Day the protagonist repeats a single day over and over again, in Replay the protagonist repeats 20 years over and over again. And this is basically the difference between the two works. See, an hour can have a moral. A day can have a moral (and in the movie it did). But a month? A year? A decade? There's no moral there -- it's just one damn thing after another.

To put it another way, the movie's a humanist treatment of the concept and the book is a science-fiction treatment. The protagonist does the sort of things you'd expect in this kind of book -- makes a fortune betting on the Kentucky Derby and investing in the stock market, tries to prevent the JFK assassination, meddles in international politics, sleeps with a lot of women. What he doesn't do is make many friends. He has a few people from his first life that he tries to keep tabs on, and there's one woman in particular he meets once he starts replaying, but he's really pretty lonely. He says he doesn't want to form relationships because it's too painful to meet people and then lose them again, but, I mean, this happens all the time in life. Not necessarily losing them to death, but to moving away, or switching jobs, or breaking up. I think the real reason he doesn't make friends is a power thing: if it's just him, then nobody's got a handle on him, and with his foreknowledge he can steer the world and do what he wants.

To put it yet a third way, in Groundhog Day the protagonist repeats the same day in the same town thousands of times. In Replay the protagonist repeats 20 years maybe a dozen times and travels all over the world. The first encourages him to look at details, to see to the essence of the people he lives with because he has no choice, not to try to build up anything for himself because any material thing he creates will vanish with the night. The second encourages him to pay attention to trends, to try to shape the world, to see what you can construct in the time you have.

Given this, is it any wonder that while the moral of Groundhog Day is "Our happiness depends on the happiness of those around us, and there'll always be enough time to learn this lesson", the moral of this book is "No matter how long it seems at the beginning there will never be enough time; so the only thing you can rely on is yourself"?

I figure I have to close this section with a point that Adam has probably already made about the book. Unsurprisingly it has a lot of scenes where the protagonist is thinking "man, I can't believe they're doing this, don't they know X is going to happen?" So it was funny to see a bit where the protagonist mentally compares somebody to a popular and well-known football player of his own time -- OJ Simpson.


Next up is another promising bookclub selection, Cloud Atlas.