In the last fortnight I’ve read new or forthcoming novels about a mirror universe where history runs backwards (The Understory, Chloe Benjamin), an agency that offers appointments with the past (Time Travel for Beginners, Jaclyn Moriarty), and a young woman who’s genetically untethered from linear life (Audrey Niffenegger’s long-awaited sequel to The Time Traveller’s Wife, out in October). And these are just the latest books to meddle with the fourth dimension. There are dozens: from Solvej Balle’s On the Calculation of Volume series and Toshikazu Kawaguchi’s Before the Coffee Gets Cold, to Kaliane Bradley’s The Ministry of Time.
Time is losing the plot – or perhaps it’s the other way around. I have an armchair theory about all this counterfactual longing: the lure of the do-over. The present feels like a corrupted timeline.
If only we could find the glitch. But even realist novels are messing with the clock. Irish author Donal Ryan’s Where Are the Kings is a study in grief-time: the ways loss distorts the ordinary passage of hours.
Days stretch, collapse, repeat and disappear. Memories gather their own temporal weight. Grief becomes a planet with its own cruel, ruminative gravity.
In his memory, Jack is forever pursuing his suicidal mother to the lake, reliving her last minutes. She is driving her rusty, backfiring Fiat; he is following behind on his pushbike, forcing his body up hill after hill. His muscles are screaming, his lungs are screaming, he is screaming.
We will never learn what prompted Jack to follow his mam – only that he knew, in that terrible, lucid way kids know. There is a version of Jack that will always be pedalling; a version of her that might still be saved. Jack is 12 when we meet him, and in the care of his mother’s people: two stoic grandparents, a trio of blustering uncles and an unhelpfully gorgeous aunt.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
