Recursion
“He has wondered lately if that's all living really is—one long goodbye to those we love.”
2.5/5⭐
The Christopher Nolan movie of thriller novels.
Heavy in twists, mind-bending concepts, and mixed timelines; but light in emotional punch and character development.
I don’t say that as a bad thing; sometimes an action packed, twist-every-page style story is exactly what I’m looking for. But this one somehow missed the mark for me.
It became so wrapped up in the complexities of time-travel (based on traveling into memories) that the stakes became warped and sometimes meaningless.
That is the risk of time-travel based stories. The possible timelines overlap over and over until the weight of any individual moment is lost. Why should I care about this interaction between characters if I know it will likely be erased (or at least faded) within a chapter?
The characters were often given “second chances” to right wrongs from their life, to repair relationships or save lives, which was genuinely interesting and had great potential to be satisfying. But the story moved on so quickly from those moments—to launch into the next big twist—that we never got to feel the full impact.
What would it be like to relive the last 20 years of your life and have the chance to repair a broken marriage? To do it right this time?
Well, this story doesn’t take much time considering or fleshing out these questions. Instead, we get another shootout, another broken timeline, and we move on.
Like a Christopher Nolan movie, at its best Recursion uses its mind-bending concepts to present unique human experiences and emotions, but at its worst, it brushes all that aside in favor of the next spectacle.
It doesn’t matter how cool the concept is if there’s no heart to keep it alive.
Underline-worthy quotes:
“By the time you know you’re experiencing something, it’s already in the past. Already a memory.”
“Perhaps there’s a reason our memories are kept hazy and out of focus. Maybe their abstraction serves as an anesthetic, a buffer protecting us from the agony of time and all that it steals and erases.”
