Time Waits For No Woman

There are two schools of thought about the nature of time traveling. First, there is the Back to the Future school. Proponents of this type of time traveling believe that you must constantly guard against changing the present by meddling in the past. Of equal importance, under no circumstances must you ever allow your past and future selves to meet. The consequences will be dire.

The second school of thought is explored in Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure. In this form of time travel, events have already been played out. If you want to get out of jail, sometime in the future, you can time travel to the past, and steal your dad's keys and leave them in a convenient location so they will be accessible at the appropriate time and place. And since the keys are there when you need them, you need not worry about remembering to put them there in the future. You already know that you have put them there. And, of course, meeting your future self is all in good fun.

The Time Traveler's Wife, by Audrey Niffenegger, definitively falls into the latter category. It tells the love story of Henry and Clare. He is a time traveler, but rather then having a time machine at his disposal, he has a genetic disorder beyond his control, and he pops in and out of time at random. She meets him when she is six, and she grows up falling in love with him during his numerous visits. The novel is a tightly woven patchwork of moments, as Henry passes into and out of Clare's life, and his own past and future. As he is constantly running into different versions of himself, Henry soon learns that his future has already been written, and there is nothing he can do to change it.

Fate is an important theme. Clare is likened to a sailor or soldier's wife, a modern day Penelope, always waiting for her husband and unable to control his comings and goings. She is an educated, talented, independent minded woman, but she is faced with the same predicament shared by women through out history, forced to watch passively as events are shaped by forces beyond her control. Except in this case, Henry is equally helpless. He has no control of his time traveling. It is difficult to know who has the harder time dealing with the unpredictability. Henry is forever scared of popping out at the wrong time, never knows where he will land, and is constantly forced to steal clothes and food and flee the police or whatever over testesteroned bully takes offense at a stark naked man running around the streets of Chicago.

What Clare most struggles with, and Harry as well, is the knowledge that their fate has already been determined. If they know their own future, and are helpless to change it, do they really have free will. I can imagine in many ways their experience is similar to what it is like for a women or minority in our society, where the circumstances of your birth limit your options from the start.

Eventually Clare embraces her fate. Her love for Henry outweighs her lack of free will:

Today is not much different from all the other days. I get up at dawn, put on slacks and a sweater, brush my hair, make toast, and tea, and sit looking at the lake, wondering if he will come today. It's not much different from the many other times he was gone, and I waited, except that this time I have instructions: this time I know Henry will come, eventually. I sometimes wonder if this readiness, the expectation, prevents the miracle from happening. But I have no choice. He is coming, and I am here.

I would not recommend reading The Time Traveler's Wife if you consider yourself a cynical person. I think Niffenegger is very sincere and earnest in her story telling. This is no straightforward story mind you. It is complexly woven, with a lot of frank and graphic situations like miscarriages and physical abuse, and does not have a traditionally happy ending. But these situations could verge on the edge of sentimentality for some. For me, it is real. This love is real love. It is imperfect love, it is love fraught with peril, with the fear of loss and the threat of being misunderstood. But it is deep and full and strong and Henry and Clare fight for each other and even if there is something of the melodramatic in their story, a heightened reality that verges on fantasy, I can relate to it. I am a sucker for sincerity every time, especially when it is combined with a compelling story.

Lyric of the Day:

Hear silver trumpets will trill
in the Arabic streets of Seville
Oranges roll in the gutter
And you pick them up
And pull back the skin
To the red fruit within

But the flavour is...Tart
And the flavour is...Tart

Is it something you crave
And you say that you
only feel bitterness
When you know it's a lie, lie, lie, lie, lie, lie

Tart
-Elvis Costello

Norwegian Wood came up on random play as I was writing this, suggesting that either life is not random, or I spent a long time to finish this review

I just finished reading Norwegian Wood, by Haruki Murakami. It is not an easy book to encapsulate, nor to recommend. It is at times depressing, and at other times quite graphic.

The story revolves around Toru Watanabe, whose best friend committed suicide while they were both 17 years old. A deathly pallor hangs over everything, and each character seems to confront reality in his or her own unique way. Just like Kundera's Immortality presents a group of characters struggling with their identity in the face of their own mortality, Norwegian Wood likewise delves into the meaning of self when faced with life in a meaningless void. The novel is gripping in the way it portrays these tortured individuals who are never entirely comfortable in their own realities, and is certainly thought provoking, but it is not an easy read.

Sanity is an issue for several of the characters. Two have been voluntarily admitted to a kind of psychiatric retreat, and they repeatedly say the only difference between the people inside and the people outside is that the people inside know that they are crazy. Indeed, Toru's friends on the outside are just as peculiar and maladjusted to society as his friends inside, maybe even more so. Toru himself feels isolated, and has few companions at his university, and struggles with the direction his life should take. He battles deep bouts of depression, and often retreats into complete solitude. He finds no comfort in the people around him, who are continually exposed as hypocrites. The one friend he regularly spends time with has overcome hypocrisy by living live as selfishly as he can, a kind of Nietzschean superman who feels nothing but contempt for most of the people around him, and in the end is revealed to have a pointless, empty life.

The ending offers little in the way of hope either. Life is lived until death, and their is no magical plan for happiness. The only sanctuary may be to find love, but love is fleeting and tortuous and convuluted and our own need to be wanted and understood too often gets in the way of our ability to return that love.

Gripping the reciever, I raised my head and turned to see what lay beyond the phone box. Where was I now? I had no idea. No idea at all. Where was this place? All that flashed into my eyes were the countless shapes of people walking by to nowhere. Again and again I called out for Midori from the dead centre of this place that was no place.

It is easy to get lost when we have no idea where we are or what direction we are headed, and when the road map presented to us directs us to keep moving forward but gives us no answer as to why we should go there or what to expect when we arrive. But for Toru, and all the characters in Norwegian Wood, that is the type of journey they are on. They can only hope they have a nice cold cucumber to enjoy along the way.

Waiting For The Raven King

Susanna Clarke took over ten years to write her first novel, Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell. So the five years I have been working on mine seem like a pittance.

It was time well spent. You can read any review and find the basic premise: England of the early nineteenth century watches as two magicians battle to revive the lost art of English magic. A cross between Jane Austen and The Lord of the Rings. A Harry Potter for adults.

It is much closer to Austen than to Tolkien. We open on the English countryside, at a meeting of the Yorkshire Society of Magicians. Except these are not practical magicians, but theoretical. The last English Magician who could actually do magic disappeared over 200 years ago. No, these magicians merely debate and squabble over what magic used to be like, back when the Raven King still ruled the north.

That is, until a gentleman from Hurtfew Abbey named Mr. Norrell, shocks all of England by proving himself capable of casting spells. He comes to London as the only practitioner of English magic, but soon gains a rival, the younger and more handsome Jonathan Strange. Together they alternately excite and horrify London society as they battle to return English magic to glory.

The comparisons to Austen are just. Two qualities especially stand out as exemplary. First, is the description. The houses, the clothes, the manners, the social hierarchy, all are explained in rich detail. A delight and a humor gives the entire affair a serious levity. The greatest effort is made to infuse a narrative history into everything. The absence of magic can only be fully appreciated when juxtaposed with all the memories of England's glorious past. An example:

Upon the instant, bells began to toll. Now these were nothing more than the bells of St. Michael-Le-Belfrey telling the half hour, but inside the Cathedral they had an odd, far-away sound like the bells of another country. It was not at all a cheerful sound. The gentleman of the York society knew very well how bells often went with magic and in particular with the magic of those unearthly beings, faeries; they knew how, in the old days, silvery bells would often sound just as some Englishman or Englishwoman of particular virtue or beauty was about to be stolen away by fairies to live in strange, ghostly lands for ever. Even the Raven King--who was not a fairy, but an Englishman--had a somewhat regrettable habit of abducting men and women and taking them to live with him in his castle in the Other Lands. Now, had you and I the power to seize by magic any human being that took our fancy and the power to keep that person by our side through all eternity, and had we all the world to chuse from, then I dare say our choice might fall on someone a little more captivating than a member of the Learned Society of York Magicians, but this comforting thought did not occur to the gentlemen inside York Cathedral and several of them began to wonder how angry Dr Foxcastle's letter had made Mr Norrell and they began to be seriously frightened.

Second, even more impressively, is the way she uses character to drive the story. These are characters in the fullest sense of the word, each with his or her own idiosyncrasies. The heroes are not trying to save the world. The villains are not out to do evil. An excessive pride afflicts every male character of a certain social standing, almost as an afterthought. Clarke wants us to know that to be a gentleman in the nineteenth century means being elevated to a place of privilege that has nothing to do with your character, and that elevated status makes it impossible to escape a heightened egotism. The main antagonist, the man with thistle down hair, is a fairy, and so his motivations and ideas about right and wrong are quite foreign to us, but nothing in his character is especially malicious. He cannot help his capriciousness any more than Mr. Norrell can help his infuriating pettiness or Strange his melancholy temper.

Casting his shadow over the whole affair is the Raven King, the long departed king of Northern England who was the greatest magician to ever live. Legends of his exploits abound. Clarke has created an entire mythos, a lattice of folk tales and memories and place names and even whole geographies that have been left behind by John Uskglass, and everyone lives in either fear or expectation of his return.

Like Don Quixote and other massive epics of their ilk, the story is filled with digressions, interludes and side stories, not to mention a copious amount of footnotes. Every character has a story to go with him or her, and every story is filled with character. She allows the story to meander over its first two thirds, as we become fully immersed in this world, and then drives it to a furious conclusion.

Every one of you should read this book.