Time-travel, anyone?...Be careful what you wish for...
Written: May 27 '05 (Updated Jun 17 '05)
Product Rating:
Pros: deeply moving, highly imaginative, a modern classic
Cons: smattering of unnecessary four-letter words--stopped me from recommending it to my friend's young daughters
The Bottom Line: If you're at all interested in time-travel and romance, this is a must-read. Even if you're dead set against sci-fi, this won't disappoint.
jc_hall's Full Review: Audrey Niffenegger - The Time Traveler's Wife
This is contemporary romantic science fiction at its best. The premise is this: What happens if a man can time-travel spontaneously but cannot control when and where he travels to? What if it’s a genetic abnormality over which he has absolutely no control? The answer is a stunning debut novel by visual artist/professor Audrey Niffenegger.
Niffenegger has written a poignant love story that spans decades in the lives of soul-mates, Henry and Clare. Clare meets Henry for the first time when she’s 6 (and he’s 36). He meets her for the first time (in real-time, that is) when he’s 28 and she’s 20. Confused? Read on.
Henry materializes in front of six-year-old Clare for the first time in the meadow behind her house. He’s first her playmate and then her companion and tutor, and as the years go by, she grows to love this man whose appearances delight and comfort her. She looks forward to his visits so keenly, yet must keep him a secret from friends and family. As a teenager, she even tries to seduce him and make him reveal what happens in her future, but Henry tells her very little of what would happen, claiming time and again that the future, like the past, cannot be changed.
It is not until Clare is all grown up that she moves to Chicago and runs into Henry at the Newberry Library where he works. He is much younger than she remembers him while he has absolutely no idea who she is, not having met her in real-time yet.
‘I can barely refrain from throwing my arms around him. It is obvious that he has never seen me before in his life….I try to explain…I’m at a loss because I’m in love with a man who is standing before me with no memories of me at all. Everything is in the future for him. I want to laugh at the weirdness of the whole thing.’
The story slowly unfolds from both Henry’s and Clare’s points of view. We get to experience, albeit vicariously, Henry’s terror and disorientation whenever he’s pulled from one place/time to another. He always materializes naked, making it imperative for him to steal to clothe himself, failing which he might well end up beaten or taken into custody or, worse still, freeze in below-zero temperatures. We empathize with Clare as she wakes without him beside her, wait for him to return, not knowing how long the wait would stretch, not knowing if he would return hale or bloody or delirious. Because even after their lives merge in real-time, Henry still time-travels, sometimes back to the younger Clare, other times to other places and other people.
As a married couple, they search for a cure, going to a geneticist who clones the errant genes in Henry’s body and inject them into laboratory mice. They try to have a child, go through the motions of a normal life, and always hovering over them like the sword of Damocles is the dread of Henry disappearing at any time.
This deeply-moving novel is a story of life-long yearning and the inevitability of love. Henry time-travels in and out of Clare’s life from the time she was a child, making her pine for him in his long absences. He copes with his ‘chrono-impairment’ as best he can, learning to pick locks and pockets in order to survive. But too soon, time catches up with them both.
The Time-Traveler’s Wife appeals to the reader on so many levels. Your senses, imagination, heart and intellect are all engaged as the story progresses, the author weaving narrative threads both forwards and backwards with a deft and steady hand.
At times heart-rending, always highly imaginative, The Time-Traveler’s Wife is compelling in its unflinching portrayal of very human characters struggling to love with a deep and abiding passion in the face of uncertainty and impending tragedy.
We might be playthings of the gods, the author seems to be saying, but our human foibles only serve to underline our almost super-human ability to love against all the odds. A remarkable effort from a first-time author. A modern classic.
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