Dissolution by Nicholas Binge Book Review

 Dissolution 

By Nicholas Binge

Published Year: 2025

Page Count: 384 pages 

Medium Used: Kindle Scribe 

Genre : Science Fiction, Memory Travel, Time Travel, Time Looping, Psychological Thriller, Suspense, Prose, 2025-read. 

Rating : 5/5 😀😀😀😀😀

This is a very easy and compulsive 5 pointer story. The prose is so good that I kept reading past the last page into acknowledgements. Despite being a story about time/memory travel and fighting a hungry force of nature, this story felt wholesome and soothing. The deep commitment and enduring love the main characters share over their decades of marriage with each other brought happy tears to my eyes. Even if they have now become old with rickety bones and batty minds, they and their love is something to cherish!

So getting into the story. Stanley, Raph and Jacques are three students under a nearly blind, old, eerie professor Waldmen in their university. Stanley comes from a poor background and always felt an outsider in school. He only ever felt belonging in the university with this group of students and the professor. They play mind chess with each other and the professor who claims that although natural selection of species has made humans forget their memories, it is possible to find techniques to a full, comprehensive memory. He picks Stanley to corroborate with him over a secret project and they shut out the other two from knowing what it is. Under strange circumstances, the professor dies by hanging himself. Years later, Raph comes into great wealth and he agrees to sponsor for the advancement of this memory perfection technology to Stanley and Jacques. But they soon uncover that the professor was actually tinkering with time and is trying to alter his past via time travel. Eventually and naturally, this creates a rift between the friends which sends them off sauntering in different paths. Fast forward to a very long time - almost 5 decades - and Jacques is still trying to find a perfect solution to alter past and control time. The problem is that everytime someone tries to tinker with the past, some hungry force wakes and erases the person's existence from history or eats away the memories so that it undoes the past. He knows that Stanley - who is now in a facility recuperating from an onset of dementia - has the solution but he has hidden it somewhere in his memories. So he tricks - initially, atleast - his wife and love of his life, Maggie to submerge herself in his memories and bring him back the solution. What it sets up for is a nail biting suspense story that had me wonder multiple times about how this one is gonna end. It ended in a way i didn't foresee but I am happy with it. There is a time loop mechanism in the story that is used multiple times by Jacques to get at what he wants - far from being confusing, I felt it is well written and developed! 

Do check out. The personality development and characterization of Maggie, Stanley and Jacques is so perfectly done that the slightest hint of deviation in their natures is obvious. So cool! One of the best.