Review
Title: The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August
Author: Claire North
Publisher: Redhook Books, New York City
Genre: Fiction/Fantasy
Year Published: 2014
Number of Pages: 420
Binding: Trade Paperback
ISBN: 978-0-316-39962-3
Price: $16.99
Reviewed by Kevin Folkman for the Association for Mormon Letters
What if eternal life, albeit of a slightly different kind than imagined in LDS theology, turned out to be not only a great blessing but a terrible curse and a burdensome obligation? Steven Peck explored this idea in his novel A Short Stay in Hell. Here, in The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August, we have a different kind of eternal life explored by a non-LDS author, Claire North. Not really a Mormon-themed book, it still struck me as relevant to members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints due to its unorthodox view of what living forever might mean.
Instead of a story about life beyond the grave, imagine that when you die, you are born again, into the same body, same place, and same family circumstances, but by age three, you have full recall of your previous life. How would that knowledge impact your second life and the choices you make? Would you think you were going mad, or would you try to correct the mistakes of the first life? Try to live differently and be a better person? Then imagine what you would feel when this happens a third time, and then a fourth, and so on, infinitely? What kind of person would you become? What changes would you make, and what changes would you cause in the timeline of history?
North’s protagonist, Harry August, finds himself in just that kind of situation, trying to make sense of his immortal (yet not really immortal) life. Over the various lives August experiences in this provocative novel, he chooses all extremes of life, from hedonism to living to make the lives of those around him better, and in some cases changing the world for the better. Even more interesting is that August finds that he is not alone in this immortality. There are others, all struggling through the same challenges that he faces. And sometimes, despite the accumulated knowledge of those multiple lives, August and his peers often make the wrong choices, with terrible consequences.
As a non-LDS author, North uses language that is not always PG-13 and writes about difficult situations, including torture, murder, and conspiracies that aim to make life better and just as often, to make things worse. I didn’t feel like any of the depictions of these events were gratuitous or overly graphic but do qualify in a few cases as hard PG-13. Choices have consequences, especially if you are living eternally. It’s just that in The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August, you always, always get a do-over.