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** spoiler alert ** For many people, the words of René Descartes have long drowned in the corners of the mind; to have consciousness is a confirmed presence & yet, what if it’s not? In works of fiction & non-fiction sprinkled throughout the ages, society has asked itself in a multitude of ways what it means to be a human; what constitutes a reality & how the time in which we are alive has any effect on the world around us. It would not be self-deprecating to acknowledge that few human beings set tidal waves in motion; overthrowing everything that the species thought it knew to introduce an entirely new concept or set of understanding. Descartes, Aristotle, Newton, Wordsworth, Proust, Wollstonecraft, Radcliffe et al. are among the very select minority of people that have added substance to the bulk of humanity.
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In Mandel’s most recent work we see the age-old question of time presented in a way so as to entice the reader to regard the philosophical pondering of great minds in a simplistic fashion. Through the presentation of multiple timelines set in centuries far apart, the reader is introduced to a handful of characters that are interconnected by their experience with a glitch in ‘the simulation�, also known as life, more specifically the state of time in which they move forward in their consciousness. In the far set future, Gaspery applies to work at the Institute where anomalies in their timeline are sought to be corrected. As we read through the story we come to learn that Gaspery is in fact the reason for said glitch; moving through timelines (centuries, lives, events) with little understanding of the motions set forth by his presence in the interconnectedness that most human beings would express as being ‘a small world�.

Few of us have not come to the realization that the world is a small place. Be it by the fluke meeting of a long-ago relation, a friend we had forgotten about or the joining of people under an otherwise coincidental event or place. Everything feels enormous when you live day-to-day but for Gaspery, as for many people in the non-fictional world, things have a mysterious way of being interlinked even without our knowing. Due to this, I am left feeling conflicted about the presentation of events within this book. How was it possible that a team of scientists who had all the technology & brains at their disposal to study anomalies within timelines, did not think of the possibility that their presence would cause in the lives of those whom they met along the way?

They did, of course, consider what is known to us within the Chaos Theory as the Butterfly Effect, as being a probable outcome & seemed to have calculated ways for the timeline to repair itself after a Traveller had made their way through time. However, I cannot speak on the level of calculations they did to ensure that this was concluded as being fact, given that Gaspery creates an insane glitch in five (5) people's lives & their timelines. Therefore, perhaps we are meant to regard the advances of science in the same way as we always have. The human brain is an absolutely fantastic tool & one that has allowed humanity as a whole to advance through multiple setbacks. Medicine, tools, machinery, vocabulary, technology, nutrition, food, etc. have all been areas that have seen huge increases in success & benefit to the species due to the dedicated work of scientists throughout the ages. Yet, we find ourselves unable to calculate the odds for certain things & see tragedy befall many an unsuspecting victim. It is therefore not far-fetched to assume that the technology & scientific tools available to Zoey, Gaspery’s sister, were prone to failure, such as every aspect of human advancement is.
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Another aspect of this book that I will acknowledge as being quite annoying was Gaspery’s decision to save Olive. In his training to become a Traveller, Gaspery was explicitly told that he would not be at liberty to influence the decisions of those he met while travelling. During this mission, he would meet Olive who would be on her final book tour on Earth & who would die due to the most recent spread of Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) over the globe. Instead of taking that information to heart, Gaspery convinces himself that he needs to warn Olive to stop her tour & return to the Moon planet on which she lives.

Wouldn’t it be wonderful if things truly worked so effortlessly? I couldn’t help but feel confused as Olive rushed back home as though a viral infection wouldn’t have already had the opportunity to infect her body while she travelled the globe. At this point in the story, the human species had already lived through multiple pandemics. Why was Olive acting without logic or reason? I would love to say that we as a species learn from our mistakes but there are too many of us in numbers to make an accurate account of everything we continue to do wrong even when fact proves us to be doing the contrary of what we know to be right.

During the Black Death, people smeared blood on their skin, sharing fluids in an attempt to respect the directions given to them. One might look at this type of behaviour & think it ridiculous. Yet, during Coronavirus (COVID-19) people refused to wear masks because they were being imposed upon them for the greater sum’s benefit. We circle around the same repeated decisions, most of which will be looked upon as making little sense; one might even say that many of the decisions done by humanity were stupid. However, that is simply par for the course when it comes to human behaviour. We make mistakes, we are in earnest, we make errors & we try our best. Such as the world turns in a circle so too do our habits & tendencies.

This leaves me feeling that there is little within the story that I can critique in terms of accuracy reflected in the characters� actions. Of course, someone along the line would have wanted Edwin to lead a full & stress-free life. Having fought in WWI, seen the man he secretly loved killed in a bombing raid, have had both his brothers killed in battle & seen his life meander through the impeding Spanish Influenza; Gaspery telling him that the glitch he witnessed was not a bout of insanity but was, in fact, real, might have been done in good faith but, ultimately changes nothing. Is it wrong to want to lend a helping hand or share in hope, even if it is short-lived? I suppose it is not.
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With all that being said, this was not a horrible book. The prose is lovely & it was written in a style that I very much enjoy. However, none of the characters spoke to me with very much depth. There seemed to be inconsistencies within the story as well which made it difficult to reason if this was simply an editing error or if the characters were given so little to say that nothing more but a repetition would suffice. For example, when Gaspery is meeting with his sister, Zoey, she tells him that Edwin became a soldier in WWI then when he is doing training at the Institute he sees a picture of Edwin in uniform & expresses that he didn’t know that Edwin had been a soldier. Another example of this is when Gaspery tells Olive that she needs to leave Earth & get back safely to her family. She automatically assumes this interaction means she was destined to die in the SARS outbreak yet, when she is laying hidden on her lawn & Zoey & Gaspery meet in the street, she expresses shock at the fact that she was destined to die in the pandemic.
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Discussions regarding post-apocalyptic literature felt a bit tedious. I appreciate that thousands of years down the line we might not have the ability to keep track of all the literature that was ever written yet, this feels improbable. There are hundreds, if not thousands, of stories regarding the ‘end of the world� type stories, Olive is nowhere near unique or original in her plot efforts. It became a bit tedious to read about her interview answers & process towards her most recent book, all the while her first book centred around a subject matter that had also been written about a hundred times over. Of course, I appreciate the irony of personal experience wherein an individual might feel like an anomaly in terms of their encounters throughout life but, it felt odd that all those years later no one would have remembered something so monumental as the dystopian novels, “Brave New World� (1932) by Aldous Huxley for example.
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As a final thought, I wonder what the logic behind framing a Traveller for an Earth inhabitants crime is. If we are to assume, as we are led to, that the crime in question is unsolved or near being solved (say in the case presented wherein the shooter is running away but could easily be fingerprinted)—what happens to the actual criminal? By substituting a Traveller in the place of an actual criminal the Institute is simply opening the door to alterations in the timelines on an endless basis. As proven by the example that was utilized in the final chapters, the Institute is not keeping a tally of victimless crimes, or shall we say crimes involving a rather low level of violence (ex. the theft of a parked car without passengers). Therefore, if the shooter, in this case, ran away & became a serial murderer what are the impacts of that on the timeline? Had they considered that or are we to link their original errors towards timeline repair as them also lacking in forethought when it came to substituting Travellers?
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When all is said & done this was a good book. Exploring the definition of an end of the world was intriguing & I enjoyed how it was approached. So many instances that feel like the end of the world could be classified as just that, for example, the loss of a child. Yet many times we say, ‘it’s not the end of the world� in an effort to comfort ourselves. This is not wrong either. Simply, I think it’s well placed to encourage the reader to regard the events in their own life as being substantial enough to validate in whatsoever capacity they have come forward as being.

If you are not interested in reading something that feels overtly familiar & has been done several times before, I would encourage you to seek out Classic literature, specifically the works by monumental philosophers. There are also movies that present similar themes to the ones within the book such as: “The Truman Show� (1998) & “Mr. Nobody� (2009). One has many options when it comes to delving deeper into Descartes’s philosophy & I should hope that this book encourages many readers to do just that.
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Thank you to NetGalley, HarperCollins Canada, & Emily St. John Mandel for the free copy of this book in exchange for an honest review!