Translated from French by Adriana Hunter
Published by Michael Joseph, 2022, 336 pages. Original version published in 2020.

March 2021. Air France flight 006 from Paris to New York is nearing JFK airport when it flies into a huge cloud and experiences severe turbulence. After some terrifying moments, the plane emerges and lands. Three months later, in June, an identical flight—same plane, same crew and same passengers—requests permission to land at JFK.

Somehow, during the turbulence in March 2021, the plane was duplicated, with one version landing more or less on time, and the other emerging three months later. Those on board the June flight have no idea what happened and believe they are landing in JFK in March.

The request to land sets off alarm bells in air traffic control, and the US authorities are alerted. They divert the June flight to a hangar. The passengers are held there without being told why. In the meantime, the originals—that is, the March batch—are being rounded up.

The US Department of Defense sets in motion Protocol 42, set up by two mathematicians to deal with unforeseen events. The protocol was set up almost as a joke, and the number is a nod to The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams. The two mathematicians join a team—a team that includes the CIA, FBI, Department of Defense, NSA and other agencies—to look into what happened. Various theories are postulated to explain the inexplicable, including extraterrestrial forces, or even the simulation hypothesis, which is that we are all part of a computer simulation and do not, in fact, exist as humans with free will.

Unbeknownst to the team, a Chinese plane has gone through exactly the same thing, something that the Chinese are keeping secret.

The US authorities start to bring the doubles together. Those from the March batch have lived three months more than the ones from June—three months during which some of them have become famous, pregnant, broken up with their partner, been diagnosed with a terminal illness or have died. These are events that the June batch have no idea about.

The book begins by introducing us to the characters. Blake is a contract killer who leads a double life as a family man and owner of a vegetarian restaurant in Paris. Victor Meisel is an unsuccessful writer whose two books, The Mountains Will Come to Find Us and Failures that Missed the Mark, have sold only a few thousand copies. He earns money as a translator, including rendering Waiting for Godot into Klingon.[1] 

Others include Lucie Bogaert, a film editor who is having an affair with André Vannier, a well-known architect much older than her. Slimboy is a Nigerian pop star who is gay but hesitating to come out. Sofia Klefman is a nine-year-old who shows signs of being abused by her father, an ex-GI, and Joanna Wasserman is a lawyer defending a large pharmaceutical company. Then there is David Markle, the pilot of the plane, who has been diagnosed with terminal cancer.

At some point, all of these people will have to face their double. But not all of the March batch are alive in June. David is dying. Victor Meisel wrote an entire book after the March plane trip called The Anomaly and then committed suicide. When The Anomaly, full of pompous pronouncements, is published posthumously, it becomes a huge sensation, and Meisel develops a cult following.  

This is an intriguing book. It is a work of science fiction, and like the best science fiction, uses the story to raise larger issues: in this case, questions about reality and free will. Will David and Victor get second chances or are their deaths inevitable, part of their pre-determined fates? If we are all part of a computer simulation, do any of us have free will?

The part I found most fascinating was when the doubles come face to face. The reactions are very telling. Some accept their double, others find a compromise and a few want to destroy the other. The thought of having a double is mind-boggling: how would you deal with someone identical to you with the same memories, the same life? What if you have a child or a partner? And what about practicalities, such as jobs, salaries and pensions?

Hervé Le Tellier fleshes out all the characters and gives us their back stories. There are several (I have not mentioned all of them in this review) and it takes skill to make us care about all of them and want to know what happens to them. Le Tellier’s style changes between chapters in a way that reflects the person he is writing about: for example, his chapters on Blake read like a thriller. In his portrait of Victor, he mocks the world of French literature and publishing.

This is a clever, interesting book with an unusual premise. I couldn’t put it down and I still think about it, weeks later. If you’re looking for something out of the ordinary, I would recommend this.

Note: Hervé Le Tellier is part of the literary group OuLiPo (Ouvroir de littérature potentielle, or “workshop of potential literature”), comprising writers and mathematicians, including Georges Perec and Italo Calvino. The group aims to discover new structures and forms of writing, including constrained writing techniques. An example of an OuLiPo work is Perec’s La Disparition, written entirely without the letter e.

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[1] A fictional language spoken by Klingons, an alien race in Star Trek.