BREAKTHROUGH: A REVIEW

Warning: Spoilers ahead.

I recently posted an essay about Ken Grimwood’s classic 1987 time-loop novel Replay. I pointed out that many online comments about Grimwood’s work have noted that none of his other five novels comes close to equaling the excellence of Replay. I can neither confirm nor deny the truth of this observation, because I haven’t read all of Grimwood’s novels. I did, however, recently read his debut novel, 1976’s Breakthrough, so I can – and will – comment on that one.

Breakthrough is the story of Elizabeth Austin, who is born in 1950 and diagnosed with epilepsy in 1963. A decade or so later, as a young married woman, Elizabeth is offered an experimental treatment to help manage her epilepsy. Brain science is not a specialty of mine, so you shouldn’t assume that my description of this treatment is one hundred percent accurate. But, as I understand it, Elizabeth’s treatment, designed by a man called Dr. Garrick, involves planting a dozen tiny electrodes in her brain, electrodes that can be toggled on and off with a hand-held device somewhat similar to a contemporary TV remote control. These electrodes have been planted in twelve so-called “silent regions” of Elizabeth’s brain. These are regions of the brain that are not affected by whatever it is that triggers her epilepsy. According to Grimwood’s book, most epileptics get some sort of trigger warning when an epileptic fit is forthcoming – a sudden scent of roses, a sense of déjà vu, a piercing headache, a sudden sense of foreboding, etc. Elizabeth’s fits are usually preceded by an olfactory warning (the aforementioned scent of roses, even when there are no roses anywhere nearby). She has been instructed by Dr. Garrick to use the remote control device to activate one of the electrodes in her brain whenever she senses an epileptic fit coming on. If she flips one of the twelve toggle switches on her remote control, it will access one of the silent regions of the brain and allow her to avert the oncoming fit. So far, so good. Through trial and error, Elizabeth eventually discovers that one of the silent regions in her brain isn’t actually silent at all. In fact, by activating the electrode in the twelfth silent region she finds herself entering into the mind of an upper-crust British woman of the 1860s, a young newlywed named Jenny Curran. Elizabeth cannot communicate with Mrs. Curran during these incursions into the other woman’s brain. But she can see what Jenny sees, hear what Jenny hears, and feel what Jenny feels. This last one is particularly important, because Elizabeth’s marriage to her architect husband, David, has become strained and largely sexless. But Jenny’s marriage to her dashing husband Philip is anything but sexless. And Elizabeth is once again able to enjoy orgiastic sex whenever Jenny and Philip have intercourse, which happens frequently. As a result, Elizabeth finds herself falling madly in love with Philip, which inspires her to activate the electrode in silent region twelve more and more often. Now, even when she is at the opera with David, or enduring one his boring work events, she is secretly also activating silent region twelve and living vicariously through Jenny. She is able to sit in a darkened theater with David in the year 1975 while also being fully aware of everything that Elizabeth is seeing and hearing and feeling in Victorian-era London. This occasionally causes her to orgasm under somewhat embarrassing conditions. In the pulpy parlance that makes pop fiction so much fun to read, Grimwood describes these orgasms as being “engulfed in a mindless universe of sybaritic plenitude.”

For a while, this double life is fairly satisfactory to Elizabeth. It allows her to escape her loveless marriage and drab home life any time she wants to. Alas, she eventually discovers that Jenny Curran isn’t the loving, high-class wife that she appears to be. At the age of thirteen, Jenny was orphaned and was then “adopted” by a swarthy, Italian libertine named Charlie Ferrara who trained her to be a sexual prodigy, capable of using her body to get pretty much any man she wanted into bed. And, after getting them into bed, she could get them to do all sorts of things for her – buy her valuable gifts, hand over large sums of money to her, and so forth. Charlie has groomed her since the age of thirteen to be a seducer of men so that, when she reached her eighteenth birthday, she’d be able to start looking for a rich and available man to marry and then, a few years later, murder in such a way that it would look like a horrible accident. After that, Jenny would inherit the rich man’s fortune and she and Charlie could live like pashas for the rest of their days.

When Jenny sneaks off to visit Charlie, she and he generally engage in sexual activities that a proper Victorian husband like Philip wouldn’t dare to suggest to his wife. At one point, Elizabeth activates region twelve and discovers that she/Jenny is lying spread-eagled on a bed in a brothel that Charlie frequents. She is naked and being made love to by both Charlie and a beautiful dark-haired prostitute. Tongues and fingers and arms and legs are exploring all different parts of Jenny’s body, and thus Elizabeth herself is being made love to in a way she has never even fantasized about. Alas, Elizabeth isn’t quite the sybarite that Jenny is. She is repulsed by Charlie’s sexual appetites. She prefers the more gentlemanly attentions of Philip Curran. And, when she hears Elizabeth and Charlie planning Philip’s impending murder, she is horrified. She loves Philip more than she loves her own husband. And she doesn’t want to lose him. Alas, she has no control over Jenny physically. In fact, Jenny doesn’t even know that Elizabeth exists. How could she? Elizabeth won’t even be born for another ninety years or so.

Desperate to keep Philip from being murdered, Elizabeth begins trying to exert some sort of influence on Jenny’s physical movements and her speech. At first her attempts are fruitless. Eventually, she is able to exert just enough influence on Jenny to cause her to spill a drink in an embarrassing situation (at the dinner table during a high-society soiree). Over time, she also gains some control of Jenny’s vocal chords. Jenny, naturally, doesn’t know what is happening to her. Ironically, she begins to fear that she suffers from some form of epilepsy. In the meantime, the date chosen for Philip’s murder is rapidly approaching. Elizabeth fears that it will arrive before she is strong enough to take total control of Jenny’s physical actions whenever she wants to. And Jenny fears that the occasional bizarre loss of her motor skills might signify the onset of some horrible ailment that will prevent her from murdering Philip and living happily ever after with Charlie.

I won’t spoil the ending for you (it includes not one but at least two jaw-dropping twists), but suffice it to say that I found Breakthrough to be a thoroughly entertaining piece of 1970s pop fiction. It combines elements of Michael Crichton’s 1972 thriller The Terminal Man with Richard Matheson’s 1975 thriller Bid Time Return (later filmed as Somewhere In Time), while managing to be more entertaining than both of those far-better-known books. It contains elements of several other minor classics of the time-travel romance genre, including Robert Nathan’s 1940 novel Portrait of Jennie, John Fowles’s 1969 novel The French Lieutenant’s Woman, and Jack Finney’s 1970 novel Time and Again. No, it isn’t a blazingly original classic like Replay, which managed to pretty much single-handedly create the modern time-loop tale, but it has held up far better than most 1970s supernatural thrillers have. If you care at all about twentieth-century American pop fiction (and why would you be reading this blog if you didn’t?), you ought track down a copy of Breakthrough (not an easy task, since it is out of print and only a few copies are available for purchase online). Reading it has left me eager read his second novel, 1979’s Elise. Now all I need is the $500 necessary to purchase the cheapest copy of that novel currently available online. If only I could go back in time a few decades and buy it at the original cover price…