By MICHEL JEURY (Macmillan; 1980)
This French sci fi novel’s orientation is indicated by the Philip K. Dick quote that begins it: “I strongly feel that to a certain extent there are almost as many universes as there are people….” Dick has long exerted a special fascination for the French, who formed an enthusiastic cult around him long before we got around to doing so here in his native land. Authors like Pierre Pelot, Martin Gately and Emmanuel Carrere were quite taken with Dick’s work, as was Michel Jeury, a prolific novelist who has (as of 2025) had just one novel translated into English: the very Phil Dickian CHRONOLYSIS.
The multi-talented Maxim Jakubowski did the translation, and Theodore Sturgeon penned a laudatory, if somewhat cautionary, introduction in which “disorientation” is the operative term. Disorienting does indeed sum up CHRONOLYSIS; in fact, I’d call it one of the most brain-fried novels of all time, and fully in line with Philip K. Dick at his wildest.
Jeury takes the quintessentially Dickian concepts of multiple identities and alternate universes to their most psychotic extremes in this tale of Robert Holzach, an elderly doctor in a future era who takes a trip into the “Chronolytic universe.” This allows him to merge with the personality of Daniel Diersant, a working stiff living in the year 1966 who’s involved in a car accident outside a scientific laboratory—but in the Chronolytic universe the doctor/worker finds himself experiencing the accident again and again and again, ad infinitum.
Dr. Holzach also becomes Renato, an illiterate Sailor who lives in a world with two suns, and gets caught up in a corporate power struggle. The details of that struggle are far too insanely complex to go into here; it’s best, I’ve found, to simply bask in the book’s relentlessly loopy, dreamlike narrative, which tends to jump all over the place time and character wise, and which I never fully understood. I’m now convinced, however, that doing so is impossible, as confusion and (yes) disorientation appear to have been Michel Jeury’s major concerns.
So no, this novel isn’t in the same league as the work of its primary inspiration. Philip K. Dick’s depth of characterization and sense of normalcy (which of course rendered the surreality of his plots all the more potent) are sorely lacking in CHRONOLYSIS, which functions solely as an exercise in uber-weirdness.