What would you change? ‘Time and Time Again’ by Ben Elton
I have often fantasised about time travel. The idea of returning to the past is so intriguing: to be able to see, hear and experience this world as it was before my own time is an incredibly attractive thought. I would of course, go with a travel kit containing three essential items: a way of returning instantly to my own time; an extra large packet of paracetamol; and at least two full courses of antibiotics. There are things about the modern era I would not sacrifice even for the thrill of travelling through time.
Ben Elton’s time-travel novel allowed me to indulge this fantasy for while. An enjoyable read which, while mostly light in tone, deals with some darker themes as well. It also poses very thought-provoking questions, summarised on the book’s front cover:
If you had one chance to change history…
Where would you go?
What would you do?
Who would you kill?Hugh Stanton, the novel’s protagonist, has been tasked with exactly this: to return to June 1914 and carry out two actions that will prevent the outbreak of World War I. In doing so, the mission’s designers believe he will also prevent many of the other human-created catastrophes of the twentieth century which followed the Great War, including the Second World War.
Sounds simple, right? Perhaps not ‘easy’ but surely, preventing the consequences of the first World War (such as the rise of fascism in a weakened Germany) will mean the world would not propelled onto the second one?
Hugh is a skilled operative, ex-military, educated, with compassion but ruthless when required…There are some hiccups but he does succeed…
…and that’s when the totally unforseen consequences of fiddling with time and past events roar to life.
The novel is a mix of speculative fiction, thriller, and historical fiction, …peopled by some ‘real life’ historical figures and events, all with intriguing twists.
It left me with an impulse to rewatch some Star Trek episodes – you know, the ones where they go on about ‘time-space continuum’ and the ‘Prime Directive’?
I also had a feeling that no matter which bit of time we might choose to adjust if we could, it’s humans that we really can’t change – and that given our natures, humans will continue to create catastrophes for ourselves, no matter what.
I can’t say much more about the plot without giving spoilers. I will say that if you know a bit of modern history and like books that ask ‘What if?’ you’ll enjoy Time and Time Again.
It was published in 2014 by Penguin Random House.
Time is a river…’There are Rivers in the Sky’ by Elif Shafak
This is a hard book to pin down. It’s part historical novel, part call to action for the survival of Earth’s rivers and waterways. It’s definitely a saga, incorporating several timelines and character arcs. There’s a little bit of magical realism, a dollop of science, plus social commentary, poetry and philosophy. It took me a few chapters to fully engage with it, but once I did I was hooked.
It begins in ancient Mesopotamia in the fabled city of Nenevah, with an educated and cultured, but ruthlessly cruel ruler, who is entranced by the legendary poem The Epic of Gilgamesh. As a single raindrop from an approaching storm falls into his hair, he commands that his former mentor and teacher be put to an agonising death for supposed treason against him. The raindrop ascends into the sky where it will bide its time, ‘waiting to return to this troubled earth again…and again. Water remembers. It is humans who forget.’ (p18)
These are the themes that are woven into the book’s several storylines; they dance around each other before coming together in its final pages: the essential nature of water to Earth and those who live here; the power of story, of poetry and language; the choices that humans make in our time on the planet.
There is Arthur, a boy born into poverty and mud on the banks of the Thames in 1840, who goes on to encounter the ancient clay tablets of Mesopotamia held in the British Museum and learns to decipher their strange cuneiform writing, stumbling across segments of the Gilgamesh poem as he does so.
There is Narin, a child of the Yazidi sect living alongside the ancient Tigris River in 2014, who travels with her Grandmother to visit their spiritual homeland, only to be plunged into persecution and war.
And there is Zaleekhah, a young woman who moves into a houseboat on the Thames in London in 2018, nursing a broken heart from a failed marriage, along with old hurts from a childhood tragedy. She is a hydrologist, studying the health and behaviour of rivers around the world.
What these three disparate people have in common is the centrality of water to their fates. Rivers, and two in particular – the Tigris and the Thames – feature throughout the novel. The lifestyles, customs, religious beliefs, legends and languages of those who have lived alongside these rivers across thousands of years, are referenced, giving a fascinating insight into topics that I had not known much about previously. This is done through stories – the lives and actions of three in particular, along with a wide cast of secondary characters.
There is some gorgeous writing throughout and so many notable passages that I had a great deal of trouble choosing just one to quote. Here is a beautiful metaphor that, I think, draws together some of the themes of this novel:
Time is a river that meanders, branching out into tributaries and rivulets, depositing sediments of stories along its shores in the hope that someday, someone, somewhere, will find them…
We carve our dreams into objects, large or small. The emotions we hold but fail to honour, we try to express through the things we create, trusting that they will outlive us when we are gone, trusting that they will carry something of us through the layers of time, like water seeping through rocks. It is our way of saying to the next generations, those we will never get to meet, ‘Remember us.’
There are Rivers in the Sky p456There are Rivers in the Sky was written by British Turkish novelist Elif Shafak and published in 2024 by Viking, an imprint of Penguin Random House UK.
I have a confession to make. I am often not a fan of the big literary prize winners. With a few notable exceptions, they can feel dry, without much of a plot or characters that I can relate to. I know I will ruffle some feathers admitting this and of course everyone comes to their reading experience in a different way with their own expectations.
Orbital by Samantha Harvey was the 2024 Booker Prize winner and was a nominated read for my book group early this year, but I missed that meeting and my turn only just came up on the borrower’s list at my local library this month. But I had heard many positive things about this book and I was keen to try it and form my own view. Unlike many Booker winners, it is a slender book, a novella really, so I was not faced with one of those weighty tomes to wade through. I took a deep breath and began.
In some respects this one lives up to my previous experience of literary prize winners. Here’s how:
- There’s not really a ‘plot’ to speak of. The narrative takes place over a single day, following six astronauts in an international space station as they orbit sixteen times around the earth. Things happen, but they are not events that move the plot forward in the traditional sense of a novel.
- There’s not a lot of character development or movement either. We learn a little about each of the astronauts, who are from six different countries, and something of their lives before embarking on this mission. But that’s kind of it. No great emotional insight to speak of, no huge conflict (inner or interpersonal), no emotional arc over the book’s duration.
- The author has a tendency to say in many words, and sometimes very long sentences, what could perhaps be said in just a few.
Did I grow impatient and annoyed, as I would ordinarily do whilst reading a book like this? No, I did not. I know these characteristics have irritated some readers and I can understand why, but what stood out instead for me about Orbital were these features:
- Exquisite descriptive writing conjuring exactly what the view from a space module’s window must look like at various times of the ‘day’ and ‘night’.
- Startling insights into the regular routine of life on board. I’m sure I’m not the only one to have never considered, for example, that orbiting the earth like this means that the astronauts experience multiple sunrises and sunsets in one 24-hour period. Actually the human construct of time means very little in space. How do astronauts adapt to this?
‘The past comes, the future, the past, the future. It’s always now, it’s never now.’ p76 - Glimpses into the psyche of an astronaut. Either the author interviewed current or past astronauts or else has a vivid imagination and emotional intelligence; either way, she brings the inner world of her characters to life so that readers can understand a little of the ‘push’ and ‘pull’ of space travel: the competing demands of home and space, what feels real and what simply imagined.
- Fascinating facts about the humdrum and ordinary. How do people in space eat, sleep, wash, exercise, spend leisure time? What are their daily chores and responsibilities? How do you exist in such close confines for months at a time with a small group like that, with no outlet or way to be with others or to be truly alone?
- What is it like to do a spacewalk, outside the space station module? Terrifying? Electrifying? Like coming home? Perhaps all of these.
What I most enjoyed about Orbital, though, is the way the author puts into perspective our globe, our earth: our (so far at least) one-and-only home, and the way the astronauts’ feelings gradually change over time about it as they gaze down on it from above:
Before long, for all of them, a desire takes hold…to protect this huge yet tiny earth. This thing of such miraculous and bizarre loveliness. This thing that is, given the poor choice of alternatives, so unmistakenly home…Can humans not find peace with one another? With the earth? It is not a fond wish but a fretful demand. Can we not stop tyrannising and destroying and ransacking and squandering this one thing on which our lives depend? Yet they hear the news and they’ve lived their lives and their hope does not make them naive.
Orbital p73Orbital was published by Penguin Random House UK in 2024
He’s back: ‘We Solve Murders’ by Richard Osman
I’ve missed the gang from Richard Osman’s The Thursday Murder Club series so much: Elizabeth, Joyce, Ibrahim, and Ron, and their associated buddies. I wasn’t sure I would warm to Osman’s new series as much. I mean, how could any new characters be as wonderful as those four?
I needn’t have worried. While We Solve Murders features new characters, new crimes, and definitely a much more multinational setting, the charm and trademark humour is there, the quirkiness of many of the characters, the twisty plot guaranteeing a page-turning absorption.
As always for me, the crimes and plot are incidental. It’s the characters and their emotional arcs, and Osman’s dry humour, that grab me and keep me reading.
In this new series we meet three main protagonists. Steve is a retired cop, settled now in a small village in England’s New Forest. While he still grieves the death of his beloved wife Debbie, he’s become a part of this community: the pub quiz on Wednesday nights, the group of friends he meets there for lunches, his cat Trouble. He likes his routine and the predictable life he’s created here.
His daughter-in-law Amy, on the other hand, thrives on adrenaline and adventure as a private security officer who crisscrosses the world on the job. At the novel’s opening Amy is on a private island, tasked with keeping Rosie D’Antonia, famous author of thriller and crime novels, safe.
That’s where the novel starts but it doesn’t stay there long. Amy and Rosie begin a chase to find a killer before he or she can get to them, and Steve is – very reluctantly – dragged in to help.
It’s a complicated and at times madcap series of events from here that lead to the final showdown. In the process we get to know the threesome well and – speaking for myself at least – I was reluctant to part with them at the final page.
It is a measure of the author’s skill that he can leave the reader breathless on one page and then on the very next, have a scene between a father and son that is both incredibly moving and very funny, so that you don’t know if your tears are from sadness or from laughter.
I’m already looking forward to We Solve Murders #2
We Solve Murders was published by Penguin Random House in 2024.
