re:mote voices

Title:The Time Traveler’s Wife
Author: Audrey Niffenegger
Publisher: Vintage

Clare is 6-years-old when a naked man appears in the meadow by her house where she plays. He convinces her that he is from the future, and provides her with a list of dates over the next 12 years of when he will visit her. From there he appears and disappears, always naked and usually a different age, becoming her secret friend in the process. He helps her with her homework, teaches her French, plays her at chess. Through this period she falls in love with him, and knows that one day she will be the time traveller’s wife.

Henry is 28 when he meets a 20-year-old woman for the first time. Though she seems to have known him for years. But then, Henry isn’t like other people, he has a tendency to travel through time. To a degree this seems to happen at random, however his disappearances tend to be triggered by stress and his destination tends to be to significant points in his life. Given that this is the woman he will marry it is not surprising that she is one of the people he will visit in the past.

This is the set up for Audrey Niffenegger’s debut novel The Time Traveller’s Wife. Which on first glance suggests a strong influence from Kurt Vonnegut’s classic novel Slaughterhouse 5. There are certainly parallels between the two, both featuring men who travel through time, visiting key events in their lives. The Time Traveller’s Wife is about 2 or 3 times longer than Slaughterhouse 5, and is much more about the people and the human relationship than a historical events like Vonnegut’s experiences of the bombing of Dresden.

The narrative unfolds through the alternating voices of Clare and Henry, progressing along a mostly linear time line from the past to the future. Working from Clare as a child growing up and being visited by Henry from the future, and the events which inform her life. To after they have met in real time and we follow events in their life as Henry travels back to visit Clare in the past.

In some ways this is a jigsaw, constructing lives through a basic science fiction idea. The time travel adding different perspectives on events over the life cycle. With this Niffenegger seems to have made a clear choice regarding how to deal with certain events which could lead to confusion. As Henry travels through time he meets people that have certain relations with him, but not necessarily at the point he is currently meeting them. This could have allowed for a range of curious scenes where the reader was baffled, which I think could have been fun. Instead Niffenegger tends towards scenes where someone says something about something that has happened, and then she delivers the scene where that thing happens.

But for all the aspects of science fiction, which can’t entirely be denied, this is more a novel about a relationship. As such it follows the ups and downs of the life Clare and Henry have together. With Henry being a particularly difficult character to deal with, every time he disappears Clare worries about what could wrong. After years of appearing places with nothing, Henry has gained a reputation over that time, having to do some strange and extreme things to get clothes, money or food to avoid being arrested or encountering other problems. To a degree Niffenegger could have just as easily done something like make Henry and alcoholic, prone to waking up with no clothes, and violent outbursts.

But the idea of time travel makes him a more unpredictable and sympathetic character. It also adds a particular edge to events, with an ability to move back and forth through time comes a knowledge of the joys and tragedies which make up life. Something which Niffenegger doesn’t skimp on as she on the one hand presents this novel as a declaration of love, while at the same time providing them with the stress and difficulty which forces Henry to flee back to that meadow in the past.

Niffenegger fills her work with texture, giving the characters a particular depth. Clare is an artist, who works with paper, like Niffenegger herself. While Henry is a librarian at a big library in Chicago. Together they visit restaurants and bars, record shops and book dealers, gigs by Iggy Pop or the Violent Femmes, and museum exhibits by the likes of Joseph Cornell. These people have families, school friends, work mates, some who know everything that is going on, some who think Henry is a dangerous person best avoided, and some who just fit into the flow of a lifetime. In the end The Time Traveller’s Wife is an emotional roller coaster, following the highs and lows of a relationship informed and emphasised by time travel, the joys and sorrows foretold and inevitable. Resulting in a compelling, quirky, surprising and memorable read.