Replay

Read Time: 2 Minutes

Jeff Winston dies while on the phone with his wife in October 1988 and wakes to find he’s back in the body of his 18-year-old self in his college dorm room. The do-over idea in science fiction is one I have often enjoyed so this one appealed to me from the blurb and I knew I had to give it a listen.

In what is his first run through of a second chance at life, Grimwood leans into the wish-fulfillment and the philosophical weight at the same time. Using the Biff Tannen method of creating wealth (betting on the known outcomes of longshot horse races, baseball, and anything else of significance), Jeff gets to live out a fantasy of doing things differently with as much money as needed to make every dream a reality.

With this comes the dawning awareness that repetition won’t necessarily bring clarity. The early parts settle into that eerie space between second chances and existential dread, as Jeff begins the first of what will become many re-lived lives.

On his third go-round, he starts again but slightly later, leading to a slow realisation that maybe there is a maximum number of do-overs, and questions about what that means.

The questions it raises are interesting. It is mentioned a couple of times that perhaps everyone relives their lives over and over again, but most don’t remember it. An interesting philosophical question to muse on. Is that where the sense of Deja Vu comes from perhaps?

Adam Sims’s narration is excellent throughout. He gives Jeff a steady, believable presence as the character cycles through hope, frustration, weariness, and the gradual search for something meaningful beyond wealth or novelty.

As a concept, Replay remains compelling nearly forty years after publication. That question many have probably asked themselves at least once. What would you do differently given possibility of a do-over. What would you change if you could?

Compared with another of my favourites in this genre – The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August – published some 30-years later, it’s same-same-but-different enough that I enjoyed it, and will again on my own replay (of the audiobook, not a replay of my own life… I assume!)

Harry August has more global conspiracy(ish) type themes and a much wider cast of replayers, but I did like the tightness, that narrower focus of Replay that let Grimwood dig into the emotional fallout of living the same life again and again.

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