 Monday, September 30, 2002
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Reposted from the archives. A review of Daniel Quinn's and Tim Eldred's The Man Who Grew Young.
Deja Vu: Humanity in Reverse
a review by Reason Wilken
At some point in our lives, most of us have wished that we could do things again. If we could just go back to childhood for a ‘do-over’, what would we change? If given a second chance, we might have made different (and perhaps better) choices with regard to our lifestyles and goals. As they say, hindsight is 20/20 and life would certainly have been easier if we could have known the consequences of our actions beforehand. Daniel Quinn’s latest novel “The Man Who Grew Young” indulges this fantasy. It is the story of a world that is getting younger (and surprisingly, wiser) with every passing day, and of the man that got to do it all again.
The book is written in comic-book style, and reads more like a script than a novel. In fact, it is a script—if one were to make a movie about the evolution of humanity and than press the “rewind” button. Our protagonist is Adam Taylor, who has been selected (unbenounced to him) as “the one who sees with his own eyes the beginning and end of his own kind”. The story opens at the gravesite of Adam’s late wife Claire, but something odd is happening. Instead of lowering the casket into the grave, it is being raised up. This is not a funeral but a “wake”in the most literal sense.
After Claire is “born again”, she proceeds through her relationship with Adam in reverse. Claire gets younger every day, and their son passes from childhood back into infancy and finally to his final resting place in Claire’s womb. Adam and Claire move out of their house back into their old apartment, go on their honeymoon, and are released from their marriage in a backwards ceremony. The couple moves from going steady to their first date to their first meeting, after which they never see each other again.
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