Recursion (Blake Crouch)

Recursion
Blake Crouch
Ballantine Books
Fiction, Sci-Fi/Thriller
**** (Good)

DESCRIPTION: New York City detective Barry Sutton had heard of FMS - False Memory Syndrome, people who suddenly and inexplicably find an extra set of incongruous life memories in their brains - but until that night atop the Poe Building he'd never encountered a victim. The suicidal woman claims to be plagued by a life that no longer existed, a marriage that never happened, a son she never had. He wants to forget about the tragedy and the death he couldn't stop. But she was so convinced, and had so many little details of the life she never truly lived, he can't help poking around. What he finds will upend his understanding of time and memory, an invention created by researcher Helena Smith with the best of intentions that is exploited by humanity's worst representatives, threatening the future of the species and possibly the structural integrity of reality itself.

REVIEW: Recursion follows some very familiar themes from Crouch's Dark Matter, which explored the quantum multiverse, but in a different enough fashion that they're not simple rehashes (mostly.) Once again, a scientist's ambitions open the door to the darkest of human impulses, and one man finds himself caught in the middle of it with a strange and attractive woman. It's hardly a spoiler that FMS is not just a matter of "false" memories - this is a sci-fi title, after all - but something far more revolutionary. His journey takes on deeply personal overtones when he's given a chance to undo the great tragedy that has defined his life, the death of his teenage daughter, but actions always have unintended consequences, even actions motivated by love. Meanwhile, Helena sees her life's work horribly altered; what started as a plan to map and store human memories against dementia (inspired by her mother, afflicted with Alzheimer's disease) instead gets co-opted by a series of outsiders once it turns out to be a scientific breakthrough she never anticipated, one that opens the gateways of time and reality. As one might guess from the "thriller" tag, the story involves lots of harrowing and horrific moments, games of cat and mouse through a malleable timestream where enemies can literally stay a step ahead of any move. Barry and Helena are pushed to the physical and psychological breaking point and beyond by their efforts to stop the world-ending cataclysm unleashed by Helena's research. At times, Crouch drew out the tension too long, there's a little too much navel-gazing on the nature of reality toward the climax, guys have a way of having to protect gals a little too often, and Barry could be slower on the uptake than a detective ought to be, plus - like in Dark Matter - there's a subtle reliance on the "white picket fence" family ideal being the only truly good and fulfilling ambition a person ought to have (with those who aspire to build other lives and careers either deeply regretting it or turning amoral/evil), but ultimately it's a decent and intense thriller.
As a closing note, I do have some minor complaint about the audiobook version. The narrators sometimes dropped their voices low to imitate whispers or mumbles, which did not work out well when one is listening to said audiobook in a less-than-quiet warehouse.

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