Blog tour: Intervention by Harrison Murphy
This post is part of a blog tour organised by Random Things Blog Tours. I received a free copy of the book in return for an honest review.
‘Disillusioned archaeologist Greg has often wondered what death felt like. Little does he know, he will prematurely find out.
‘After a fatal car accident, he enters The Cloud – a viewing platform with the ultimate box set of everything that has ever happened, and has yet to happen, on Earth.
‘As Greg excavates the artefacts of his own history, journeying across time and realities, he discovers he has a power he could never have imagined: Intervention. The ability to change one thing on Earth but sacrificing his eternal existence in exchange.
‘Will he take the deal? What will he change? And what ripples will spread from his Intervention?’
Intervention, by Harrison Murphy, follows three characters – boorish Greg, self-centred Una, and conscientious Liam – as, in alternative timelines, they die in the same road accident and discover that in the afterlife they enter The Cloud, where they can see every past and future event on Earth.
Not only this, but each person who goes to The Cloud can make a single intervention, with the caveat that this is the last thing they’ll ever do. There are some restrictions: you can’t make a change so big it unravels the fabric of reality (so no killing Hitler); you can’t undo your own death (though you can intervene in other people’s – so you can die and intervene yourself, then be restored to life by someone else, with no memory of dying or intervening); and you can’t make anyone on Earth aware of The Cloud’s existence.
We explore the characters’ reactions as they acclimatise to their new surroundings, consider how (if at all) they’d like to intervene, and how their interventions over-write history in small but significant ways. We also find out that one of them knows more than they should, and is using their knowledge to “game the system” to the extent the rules allow.
I found Intervention engaging and enjoyable. With five new versions of events over-writing timeline 1.0, there’s the potential for things to become very confusing, but the author helpfully keeps us on track by reminding us who’s in The Cloud each time we switch streams. And, as with many parallel universe/time travel stories, it also helps not to overthink it!
I had varying degrees of sympathy for the characters, but in all cases, it was fascinating to see how they reacted to being in The Cloud (Greg: despondency; Una: boredom; Liam: curiosity), as well as the ways various characters chose to intervene, and their motivations, which were often emotionally charged as a result of viewing scenes they hadn’t been privy to while alive.
It was also really interesting to see how the same scenes on Earth unfolded so differently with just a minor tweak. In addition, there’s a secondary storyline that explores what happens when a group of people on Earth do find out about The Cloud – explaining why the rule preventing that had to be added.
The stories are relayed to us by a personification of The Cloud itself, which is a nice touch. Its all-knowing voice and sharp observations of human behaviour put me in mind of some of Will Carver’s novels, which are narrated by Evil. It did have a tendency to repeat certain key points, though, and these might have been edited out for a smoother read.
Intervention is a mind-bending and imaginative speculative novel.
