Review: Recursion

Recursion by Blake Crouch
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

“Remembrance of things past is not necessarily the remembrance of things as they were.”
― Marcel Proust

As anyone who has known someone with Alzheimer's Disease knows, the person we are is defined largely by our memories. Our brains, sponges soaked in neurotransmitters, operate miraculously, making new memories, retrieving old ones, until... until they don't. Loss of one's memory, whether due to a catastrophic event like a traumatic brain injury or to a slow erosion of functioning, like dementia, is one of the most devastating things that can happen to a person, or to those who love them. The role of memory in making a person who they are provides the inception of Recursion, a book about both memory and time travel. Elegantly written, with the feel of literary science fiction, Recursion follows two protagonists, Helena Smith, a neuroscience researcher, and Barry Sutton, a NYC police detective. Helena is pursuing creation of a device that would allow her to record memories, hoping to use the machine to preserve her dementia-suffering mother's memories. Barry is haunted by the case of a woman who commits suicide due to a newly described mental illness, False Memory Syndrome. For the first third of the book, Barry and Helena's chapters alternate until they fatefully cross paths and unite in the effort to prevent the ultimate disaster that is the outcome of her invention. For simply preserving memory is a less ambitious goal than some who know about Helena's "chair" have in mind. From an unscrupulous billionaire to the military, the potential uses of her research can be exploited in deleterious ways. There would be no way to describe these potential uses without spoilers, so I won't even try.

There are aspects of the book that are fascinating yet I was frustrated with several issues in the book. The complete lack of overtly discussed bioethics bothered me early on and even the validity of a researcher testing their methodology on themselves troubled me. (Having a background in research science always makes it a challenge to convince me fictional science is any good.) But beyond that issue, I was puzzled by the relationship between Barry and Helena. I never understood the relationship between them. Whereas a considerable amount of time was spent on Barry's relationship with his daughter Megan and his wife Julia, other than a common cause and a trauma bond, I wasn't really sure what Barry and Helena were doing together. They were from two such different worlds and I didn't feel the bridge they built across their worlds. I also felt that the assured mutual destruction issue near the end was overdone and lacked believability, as it didn't really solve the problems there were to solve.

Overall this was a well-written and sometimes poignant novel. It made me feel just how fragile and temporary we are.

The audiobook, narrated by Jon Lindstrom and Abby Craden, was a pleasure.

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