Publisher: Vintage (2005)

Pages: Paperback, 528 pages

Price: £7.99

Buy on Amazon UK

Reviewer rating: 

4

Pros: 

How to live knowing what the future holds? Tender and tragic love story.

Cons: 

Inevitably requires some serious suspension of disbelief!

It took me a long time to get around to reading this novel, as the things I'd heard about it suggested a situation so romantic and ridiculous I was afraid I'd hate it. But when I finallly did pick it up, I was pleasantly surprised. 

Henry de Tamble often finds himself whisked away from his present surroundings and dumped unceremoniously, naked and nauseous, in a different era of his life. He can’t control where he ends up, although, sometimes, the complexity of his travels means that he knows where he’s going to be. Quite often, he meets himself, and quite often, too, he bumps into people he knows with confusing results. But always he ends up alone and exquisitely vulnerable, in desperate need of food and clothing, at the mercy of the police and an ungentle society. In consequence, Henry’s a bit of a tough man; he can pack a punch and pick a lock and has no compunction about stealing as he has to find a way to survive. Niffenegger wants us to understand that this is not a story of an extraordinary skill, more the tale of a particular kind of modern martyrdom. Time travel is usually associated with power, influence, rescue and adventure, with the magic part of its magic realism enhanced to thrilling effect. Instead we have a narrative that calls it chrono-displacement, treats it like a chronic and debilitating illness and uses it to pose some uncomfortable existential questions.

Knowledge is a fundamental problem of humankind. Most novels treat the question: how can we tolerate our crippling ignorance of what will happen next? But this novel poses a different question: how can we manage to live with knowledge of what the future holds? At the heart of the novel is the love story between Henry and Clare, who meet when Clare is six and Henry is thirty-six and marry when Clare is twenty-two and Henry thirty. One of the great strengths of this novel is that the confusing nature of Henry’s time traveling is always beautifully explained and cleverly handled.

The early stages of the novel chart Henry’s random appearances in Clare’s back garden as she grows up, aware from childhood that this is the man she will one day marry. There is no enigma as in most orthodox love stories, as to whether their love will last. Instead, the obstacles they face are rather different ones. Henry’s always on the point of disappearing, and Clare never knows when or in what state he will return, beaten up, injured or traumatized by a glimpse of what the future holds. Given that stress (naturally) is what triggers Henry’s time traveling, the ordinary-extraordinary events like marriage and childbirth hold more than the usual pitfalls for them. And worst of all, Henry’s been to the future and he knows how it all ends. It’s a combination of the tragic aspects of their love story, and the rare but spectacular compensations of his condition that motivate most of the plotline, whilst keeping the reader enthralled and often deeply moved by their plight.

I’m not generally fond of books that take a reader’s heart, macerate it and then put it through the shredder, so I was wary of reading this one. On the whole, the witty and inventive voice of Niffenegger keeps it intriguing more than heart wrenching, and this is a novel deeply informed by art and philosophy, which lend it beauty and intricacy. But underlying its lighter moments is a steady current of darkness. Henry’s time traveling is far more a liability than it is a gift, and fundamentally the problem is that he arrives in his new dimension naked. If he remained dressed, the whole complexion of the journey would change. But figuratively and physically vulnerable, Henry is always an accident waiting to happen. There is no real motivation for this other than Niffenegger’s dark vision. I understand that Henry is supposed to be unable to take anything through time with him, but this isn’t entirely true; whatever injuries he’s sustained make it backwards, or forwards again and it seems just plain mean of fate that he’s lumbered with his wounds but deprived of his clothes.

And so the darker moments accumulate, Henry’s existence becomes ever less viable, and from two-thirds of the way through it becomes apparent that tragedy waits in the wings for our time-crossed couple. The tragedy is the only part of this narrative I had a problem with – it was the only time that the time travel looked like a device and was used as a very blunt deus ex machina. But once it was out of the way Niffenegger had something even more bitter, and yet terribly sweet, up her sleeve to create a perfect, tear-soaked ending. This is sentimental stuff here, the kind of storyline that make you hold tight to your loved ones and bless merciful, banal reality, but it is continually upheld by strong writing and a sharp intelligence. I didn’t expect to like this book, but I ended up admiring it, and Niffenegger, for having produced something very unusual, that felt surprisingly real.