Paperback, 400 pages
English language
Published Aug. 9, 2001 by Gollancz.
[Comment by Audrey Niffenegger, on The Guardian's website][1]:
Time and Again is an original; there is nothing quite like it. It is the story of Si Morley, a commercial artist who is drawing a piece of soap one ordinary day in 1970 when a mysterious man from the US Army shows up at his Manhattan office to recruit him for a secret government project. The project turns out to involve time travel; the idea is that artists and other imaginative people can be trained (by self-hypnosis) to imagine themselves so completely in the past that they actually go there. Si finds himself sitting in an apartment in the famous Dakota building pretending to be in the past . . . and ends up in the Manhattan of 1882.
The story makes good use of paradox and the butterfly effect, but its greatest charms lie in Si's good-humoured observations of old …
[Comment by Audrey Niffenegger, on The Guardian's website][1]:
Time and Again is an original; there is nothing quite like it. It is the story of Si Morley, a commercial artist who is drawing a piece of soap one ordinary day in 1970 when a mysterious man from the US Army shows up at his Manhattan office to recruit him for a secret government project. The project turns out to involve time travel; the idea is that artists and other imaginative people can be trained (by self-hypnosis) to imagine themselves so completely in the past that they actually go there. Si finds himself sitting in an apartment in the famous Dakota building pretending to be in the past . . . and ends up in the Manhattan of 1882.
The story makes good use of paradox and the butterfly effect, but its greatest charms lie in Si's good-humoured observations of old New York and the love story that gradually develops between Si and the beautiful Julia, who doesn't believe Si when he tells her he's a time traveller. Time and Again is laden with authentic period photos and newspaper engravings which Jack Finney works into the narrative gracefully. When I first read WG Sebald's Austerlitz, a very different book in both subject and mood, I realised that it owed something to Finney's innovative use of pictures as evidence within a novel. Really, the pictures seem to say, this did happen, I saw it, don't you believe me? The pictures cause us, the readers, to sway slightly as we suspend our disbelief; they look like proof of something we know is unprovable. Isn't it?
There is something wistful about time travel stories as they age: 1970 is now 41 years past. A lot happened in those years, and these characters are blissfully unaware of the future. I get a little shiver of nostalgia in the book's opening pages: gee, people used to go to offices and sit at drawing boards and get paid to draw soap. What a world. Perhaps if I could imagine it completely enough, I could visit . . . but no. I'll just read about it, again and again.
[1]: www.guardian.co.uk/books/2011/may/14/science-fiction-authors-choice
I cannot imagine wasting my ability to travel through time by following around people involved in a case of blackmail. The ending's not too bad, but I did not find it worth the slog.
An incredible time-travel adventure, 'Time and Again' has sketch artist Simon Morley traveling from 1970 to 1882 as part of a government project. Be patient with the story and adjust to it's pacing. You will be rewarded with a thrilling mystery novel and transported to a historical world entirely foreign to today.
I think I have to give an addendum to my rating. The research in this book was great, tons of fun. It was easy to get swept up in Morley's exuberance about the buildings, the people, the rural young New York he found himself surrounded in. At times the details are almost too fine, but he can be forgiven. I'm sure if I wrote an account of my trip to 1880s New York it'd be just as involved.
The plot, being a bit of a mystery, worked well too. If in doubt, nothing gets a plot moving like a good hunded-year-old mystery.
I often felt that Morley had extremely rose-tinted views of absolutely everything—the food was better (he managed to avoid flour cut with sawdust or days old meat or food-borne illness, this was all prior to any food regulatory body) the beer was better, everything. No horse poop. No …
I think I have to give an addendum to my rating. The research in this book was great, tons of fun. It was easy to get swept up in Morley's exuberance about the buildings, the people, the rural young New York he found himself surrounded in. At times the details are almost too fine, but he can be forgiven. I'm sure if I wrote an account of my trip to 1880s New York it'd be just as involved.
The plot, being a bit of a mystery, worked well too. If in doubt, nothing gets a plot moving like a good hunded-year-old mystery.
I often felt that Morley had extremely rose-tinted views of absolutely everything—the food was better (he managed to avoid flour cut with sawdust or days old meat or food-borne illness, this was all prior to any food regulatory body) the beer was better, everything. No horse poop. No cholera or typhoid or tuberculosis, the lucky man. Poverty gets mentioned, several times, but it still feels awfully distant than the easy privilege he falls into when he shows up.
And maybe this is a symptom of the time period they were written in... But though there were very well developed, interesting female characters with intelligence and personality, and though Morley purported to view them as equals, he described them so patronizingly. Like extremely capable children. Made me twitchy.
