Recursion by Blake Crouch

Read June 2019. Published 13th June 2019.

New York City cop Barry Sutton is called to a high rise building, where a woman is threatening to throw herself off a balcony. As the first cop on the scene, he tries to talk her down, but this woman is a victim of the rapidly spreading phenomenon dubbed FMS (False Memory Syndrome) - she has memories of a life completely different to the one she is living and no longer knows what is real and what is not - and he is unable to stop her.

Victims of FMS are being driven mad by the memories of lives they have not lived: memories which are often of traumatic events and even death. The suicide rate is growing and people are becoming scared that they may catch the disease too.

Neuro-scientist Helena Smith is obsessed with memory. Her own mother has dementia and Helen is consumed with the need to perfect technology that will allow precious memories to be recorded, so they could be experienced again. Just as Helena is in desperate need of more funding to perfect her methods, a mysterious benefactor comes forward to offer her unlimited resources to continue her work.

As Barry pursues his investigation into FMS, he comes up against an opponent that will stop at nothing to get what he wants. It will take Barry and Helena to work together to protect the fabric of the past and save the World from destruction.

This book is amazing and really difficult to review without giving away spoilers - which I am not going to do - but I will try to explain what it is about!

It is not just a book about memory. It is about the nature of reality and how we experience it.

It starts with the premise that the reality we perceive is always made of of moments which have already passed, because our brain cannot process the stimuli received by our senses instantly.
It follows, therefore, that our own reality is actually made up of "memories" of the stimuli we have received. Ok, still with me?

But what is "the past"? This is something we have already experienced, right? Or is it just that we have created a framework on our experiences that forces us to process them as having followed a temporal sequence. Is Time just a construct that we have imposed upon ourselves to help us process the world around us?

What if you could access the memories you have stored in your brain and experience them as if you were in that exact moment again? Would it be possible to fully immerse yourself in "the past" again?

I know this sounds mind-boggling and quite frankly, it is! However, Blake Crouch has managed to craft a wonderfully complex and thrilling story that makes you, not only question the nature of reality itself, but also to do it as part of a tense and gripping story-line too.

I absolutely loved Crouch's previous book, Dark Matter. It is one of my absolute favourite books about alternative realities, so Recursion was going to have to be pretty damn good to follow in its footsteps.
I can categorically say that Recursion has not been a disappointment. This is a much more complex book than Dark Matter, but Crouch has handled this follow-up with aplomb. Bravo!