The Time Traveler's Wife

Hurray, I'm done.

I listened to this as an audiobook and fairly quickly came to the conclusion that I'm not really intellectual enough to get all the name dropping. Nor do I speak French at all, so there were a couple of paragraphs where something was quoted at length in French. I don't know about an actual paper edition, but the audiobook didn't offer anything in terms of translation. There was also at least one bit where it was in German instead of French, but the narrator's accent was a bit... I do know some German, but I couldn't actually identify this as being German until it was said that it was. Then again, this was the sort of narrator who also pronounces the word 'mirror' as thought it was spelled 'mirrrr', so there you are. But that's mostly to do with the audiobook recording.

The bit about me not being intellectual enough still stands, though. Seven hundred thousand artists, musicians, poets, what have yous that I've never heard about, some of which may or may not be fictional. A world of meh to all this pretentious look-how-smart-I-am-ing.

Nor am I sufficiently interested in blow by blow instructions for how to cook this or that meal or how to make paper or how to make a drawing or how to pick locks or how to have sex or how to play a board game complete with all the dice rolls and which square their piece lands on or what everybody is wearing at any given time or every single item they bought at the grocery shop or what supporting characters had for breakfast or what kind of irrelevant dream they had at night in gory detail or what kind of medicine they take and how much or random notes a character made on random scraps of paper. For me, it did not add atmosphere or enrich the story with details or anything of the sort. It just made me bored. And irritated. If I had been involved in the editing process (I'm not an editor) I would have adviced the author to try and curb this need for miniscule detail. Just a bit. Just enough so it didn't make it sound like she was being paid per word.

The primary problem I had with this book, however, was the fact that I found it very difficult to like the characters. Clare is a doormat who puts up with pretty much anything, spends her entire life tethered to Henry and as a consequence never really makes her own decisions about anything at all. Henry has basically told her that she can't anyway, so why bother? Everything she does is rooted in what Henry has told her about her future. Henry comes across as some kind of borderline sociopath, grooming Clare from an early age while hiding behind 'it has already happened in a way sort of can't change it'. Well, maybe he can't, but then nor does he seem to care much. It serves his own ends after all. Not to mention the casual violence. The mugging of people. Breaking into places. Stealing with arms and legs. I get that he probably needs to in order to survive when time travelling. That's not my problem. My problem is that he enjoys doing it, as though mugging someone is just a minor inconvenience for the victim. It's mentioned a time or two that he's been arrested numerous times, but have escaped the consequences by time travelling. How convenient that he never at any time has to take any sort of responsibility for anything at all. The victims are all just extras anyway, so who cares? Except of course one particular person who was threatened with murder, tied to a tree, and then casually kicked in the groin (which could actually have permanently damaged the equipment, thus adding maiming to the list). Granted, that particular person wasn't the nicest guy around, but still. Murder threats. Casual violence. No consequences to Henry or Clare, because they are the main characters so obviously above the law here. They make their own law and others applaud them for it. I very nearly stopped listening at that point.

I think probably I could have liked the story a lot better if the characters hadn't all been so unlikable.

I bashfully admit that I read this book because I saw the previews for the movie, which made it out to be a completely sappy doomed romance. I am a huge sucker for a completely sappy doomed romance.

In terms of a completely sappy doomed romance, this was a very successful book. I was emotionally drawn into it and found it sad and poignant at the end.

I was also impressed by the structure, with the interweaving narratives back and forth across time, with different characters knowing different things at different times. That is a hard writing problem, and the author has done a terrific job at building and drawing out the story in a non-linear way. Some really nice work here.

On the other hand, there's also a lot of overwrought melodrama in the writing. And I think the author was a lot more impressed with Henry as a character than with Claire. Claire doesn't seem to have a lot of ambition or much of a personality at all other than being with Henry. Her character is completely subsumed by being with Henry. The supporting characters were very thin indeed, and the attempt to explain Henry's time travelling as a serious genetic anomaly was laughable.

Yeah, the more I think about it the less it holds together, so probably I should stop thinking about it. It was a good way to spend a lazy weekend on the couch.

This book bothered me for a lot of reasons that weren't its fault, so let me first say it's a lovely, somewhat slow-moving book that never felt slow-moving.

It bothered me that it's somehow, by virtue of I'm-not-exactly-certain-what, escaped the SF classification. I'm not giving anything away here when I tell you there's a time traveller in this book. How is that not speculative fiction? The laws of physics have been altered. I'm a fan of SF, and it annoys me no end that there's an idea that if a book is good enough, it must not be SF anymore, creating an SF ghetto.

However, perhaps it has escaped classification as SF simply because the central driving conflict of this book wasn't about the limits of possibility or humanity at the edge, but merely about fate and choice, an old theme that one doesn't really need to invoke SF to explore. Despite its time-travelling shenanigans, the book seems to argue that one can only discover the future one day at a time, and really things are best that way. In fact, the book's ending is easily guessed at in the second chapter, and yet the book still gently unfolds its way to the inevitable as if it were a mystery.

Additionally, this book annoyed me for its title. Recently I read (and have lost track of where, but never mind) someone's irritation at the fact that there are countless books titled along the theme The XXXX's Wife, but seemingly none named XXXX's husband. Although the book takes turns with its narrative point of view, switching from Claire to Henry and back again, Claire's life seems so subsumed in Henry's that in the rare cases where a scene told in Claire's pov doesn't have Henry present, it is generally still about Henry. The book explicitly compares her to Penelope of The Odyssey, and indeed, Claire is always waiting for her husband, it seems, or rejoicing at his return. This bothered me most when Henry dies, and although Claire's refusal to move on from him is explicitly treated as harmful to her in the text, the narrative nonetheless skips from her mourning, directly to the end of her life when time-travelling Henry returns to her from a time before his death, and then the book ends. Claire exists only as the time-traveller's wife, never as her own woman.

When I was quite young, I read far too many Victorian novels. One of the plots that recurred was that of the young isolated girl in the guardianship of a man. Because this was Victorian, he was never really in anything that modern readers would read as a father-role. He appeared, entertained and delighted her, and then mysteriously disappeared; all actual child-rearing was done by domestics, naturally. The girl would grow up worshipping and looking up to him, waiting for his visits when he would bring her presents, pass judgement on her academic accomplishments, and tell her about the world. Generally, at about the age the whole thing began to look really skeevy there would be a prolonged separation, usually against the girl's will, where the girl would go out and discover the world. Then she would meet her protector again, this time "as a woman!" and now their love can be acknowledged/acted upon. This book comes far too close to that plot for my comfort, although it does, at least, explicitly acknowledge what the Victorians seemed unaware of.