Neither Jeff nor Pamela are remarkable in any way — on the contrary, they lived a pretty unremarkable life until the day they died. They’re just ordinary people in extraordinary circumstances. Their actions are very believable to the reader because of that – after all, what would any of us do if he/she had the occasion of relieving his/her life? Get rich? Save the world? Get really really stoned? Marry a nice girl/guy? Jeff has done all these and more. Each time knowing that whatever things he had accomplished (his fortune, his daughter, his marriage to Judy) would eventually fade away to nothingness (or, who knows, perhaps a parallel Universe?). Kind of a hard thing to swallow, isn’t it?

I must say I have found quite interesting the theory Stuart McCowan has come up with to explain their situation (I mean, the guy was clearly crazy but the idea was sort of cool in a sci-fi/Matrix kind of way): the whole Earth is a sort of simulation for the entertainment of aliens from Antares.

“Why do the extraterrestrials like violence here on earth so much?”
[...]
“None of them ever dies anymore,” Stuart went on impassionedly, “and they’ve lost the killing genes, so there’s no more war or murder where they come from. But the animal part of their brains still needs all that, at least vicariously. That’s where we come in.

“We’re their entertainment, like television or movies. And this segment of the twentieth century is the best part, the most randomly bloody time of them all, so they keep playing it again and again. But the only people who know all this are the performers, the ones on stage: the repeaters. Manson is one of us, I know; I can see it in his eyes, and the Antareans have told me. Lee Harvey Oswald, too, and Nelson Bennett that time he got to Kennedy first. Oh, there’s a lot of us now.”

Speaking of Nelson Bennett and Kennedy, that’s an interesting part of the story too (a part that I think the author had a bit of fun with). In his first replay Jeff tries to stop the assassination of Kennedy, so he sends a fake letter to the police, signed Lee Harvey Oswald, where he declares his intentions of murdering the then president. Sure enough Oswald is arrested and Jeff is happy he changed history to the better. Until the fateful day came and Kennedy was still assassinated, only this time by a previously unknown guy, one Nelson Bennett. Jeff thinks that the guys that have organized the assassination must have had a backup plan, and that this probably means he cannot actually influence the greater events of the future (although he later proves he can, by mistakenly telling the wrong things to the wrong person and, as a consequence, having Al-Quaddafi killed and all the history of the world completely changed) – my first thought though was that perhaps the author was trying to suggest that Lee Harvey was not the one who killed Kennedy but a mere prop.

Speaking of the replay that had Al-Quaddafi killed, that is perhaps one of my favorite ones — if not my very favorite of them all. I couldn’t quite put my finger on the reasons though, perhaps because it had started out with some very good intentions plus a brilliant idea (Jeff and Pamela needed help to figure out more details about the delays they experienced when starting each replay, so they decided they should make the scientists of the world work for them — how? by intriguing them with their unusual situation. How would they prove they are who they say they are — and save lots of lives in the process? Why, by publicly predicting some disasters, of course). Only some government organization gets interested in them and takes them into custody, forcing them (including via sodium pentothal and polygraph sessions) to make predictions about the future politics of various countries — then acting in consequence, such as killing Al-Quaddafi when they found out he will appoint himself premier in Lybia at a later date. The result? In about ten years time lots and lots of people were killed due to the changes made in the historical timeline, all weighing on Jeff and Pamela’s conscience (not to mention they got nothing they originally wanted, they got no scientists’ help and people were no longer warned of disasters).

What I liked most: The feeling of loss. Better said, the idea of the feeling of loss. The idea that even if one’s life could be lived all over and he/she would make the most altruistic choices (Pamela once was a children doctor) or the wrongest ones (see the above example), it will all turn to nothingness in a few years. Well, I don’t like the idea in itself, but the powerful frustration it invokes. All these lives, all these years, all these efforts, all these accomplishments – and nothing, absolutely nothing left. A though in itself that makes the idea of “replaying” one’s life quite unappealing to say the least.
(Although if you think about it there is one thing you always take with you, even when replaying – that is your mind, your capacities, your talents. Which means the replaying would probably be interesting for a person dedicating his lives to intellectually enriching his persona rather than building anything in the physical plane. Although all that knowledge with no one to share it wouldn’t be a thing to look forward to either)

What I liked least: I don’t know if that should be an actual issue (well, it hasn’t bothered me that much actually) but I was sorry that the author did not gave an explanation as of why everything had happened. Was it a random phenomenon or did it have an actual meaning? (such as, I don’t know, the hero and the heroine to learn some important things or just to find each other — I mean, they did learn to appreciate every moment of their time but did they actually need to live hundreds of years to realize that? :P )

Recommend it? Yes :) I wasn’t very taken with it at first but after a while I’ve grown really interested in it.

Amazon Affiliate. If you click an Amazon link and buy something, I receive a small percentage of the purchase price.

Popularity: 4% [?]