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Hobby Forum Index » Arts - Books - Reviews » Book Review: Replay (Ken Grimwood)
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| Anthony Campbell |
 Posted: Thu Aug 14, 2003 2:46 am |
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Ken Grimwood
REPLAY
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Book review by Anthony Campbell. Copyright © Anthony
Campbell (2003).
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This novel has been reissued after a long gap, and
deservedly so. It seems to be one of the best-kept secrets
in modern literary history. Sadly, Grimwood died recently,
at the age of 59; it was reading an obituary in the press
that brought his writing to my attention, and I was quite
bowled over by this book.
The basic idea of the book is not original, but the
treatment is. The theme is that of time and time paradoxes.
The first chapter opens thus: "Jeff Winston was on the
phone to his wife when he died.". He is in his early
forties in 1988 when it happens; immediately afterwards he
finds himself a college student again, aged 18 in 1963,
with full recollection of his earlier life. Since he can
remember the outcome of major sporting events he is able
quickly to amass a fortune by betting on the outcome; he
also has the intellectual and emotional maturity of a much
older man. He therefore drops out of college, becomes rich,
and proceeds to enjoy himself. Later he gets married, to a
different wife this time, and has a daughter whom he loves
passionately. Then he dies again and returns a second time
to his student existence. Other lives follow in succession,
each different from the others.
Some lives are hedonistic, some romantic and fulfilled, but
all end at the same time in 1988. Eventually Jeff meets
Pamela, the great love of all his lives, who is also a
Replayer, and he and she continue to seek each other out in
their successive lives. But dark notes begin to intrude:
the pair make an ill-advised attempt to go public with
their experience, and they notice that each time they come
back to life they are older, so that the time of clear
consciousness and memory available to them is becoming
progressively shorter. It seems that they will soon be lost
to each other, having ultimately died irretrievably, but in
a final twist the book ends on a positive if elegiac note.
Grimwood is a most inventive writer. One of the merits of
the book is the continual twists and turns in the story
that keep you reading to find out what happens next. This
only works well, however, if you care about the characters,
and here, too, Grimwood is successful. Too often in novels
of this kind the characters are ciphers, serving only as as
reference points to hang the story on. Not so here; Jeff
and Pamela are thoroughly convincing and they develop in a
plausible manner as their lives go by. So the narrative
evolves in a way that is determined by the characters
rather than according to the exigencies of a prearranged
plot.
There is, however, much more to this book than the
development of character; Grimwood is drawing on a very
deep well indeed. The story is fantasy, of course, but
fantasy based on very ancient ideas. Reading it, one thinks
of reincarnation and of the myth of eternal recurrence
which we find in Plato and in Nietzche. There are also
hints of Everett's "many worlds" interpretation of quantum
theory. But all this is implied, never stated or even
openly discussed; we see things almost entirely through
Jeff's eyes and he is no philosopher. He feels what is
happening to him deeply but he cannot understand it or
theorize about it except at the most elementary level. This
was a wise decision on Grimwood's part; by avoiding
detailed intellectual analysis of what is going on he makes
the emotional impact all the greater. Others have tried to
make use of these ideas in fiction before but none that I
have seen has done so with the subtlety that Grimwood
brings to it.
It would be a disservice to readers to classify this as
genre fiction (science fiction, fantasy or whatever). It is
good enough to stand up in its own right as fiction pure
and simple, and fiction of very high quality at that.
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%T Replay
%A Ken Grimwood
%I Perenniel (HarperCollins)
%C New York
%D 1986, 2002
%G ISBN 0-688-16112-X
%P 310 pp
%K fiction
%O paperback
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