The Time Traveller’s Wife is the story of Clare and Henry. Clare, like the novel’s author Audrey Niffenegger, is a visual artist, while Henry is a disappearing artist. More specifically he disappears in time – travelling mainly into the past. This enables him to meet his Clare, his future wife, for the first time when he is 24 and she is 5. The pedophilic implications of this are initially worrying, particularly since only Henry’s body and not his clothes can travel in time. However, this is not a book for about moral corruption but is fundamentally a conventional love story, albeit with the temporal twists.
Time travelling is a mainstay of Science Fiction from Terminator to Dr Who, but Henry is no time lord nor is his special skill presented as a superpower. He explains the phenomenon like this : “I think it’s a brain thing. I think it’s a bit like epilepsy because it tends to happen when I’m stressed, and there are physical cues, like flashing light, that can prompt it. And because things like running, and sex, and meditation help me to stay put in the present. Secondly, I have no conscious control over where or when I go, how long I stay, or when I come back”.
As such, it’s not a state he is particularly happy about which is why he seeks, unsuccessfully, to rectify it by modifying his genetic makeup. There is not even the comfort of being part of a community of time travellers – so far as he know he is unique.
In literary terms, the novel has more in common with A.S. Byatt’s ‘Dispossession’ than H.G. Wells’ ‘The Time Machine’. Niffenegger uses the device to reflect on time and memory in general. There is darkness and humour but neither are exaggerated for effect. She tells the story in matter of fact terms in an elaborately structured narrative with a perspective that switches constantly between the two protagonists. The question “When are you from?’ becomes more important than “Where have you been?”
We learn early on that nothing about the past can be changed placing a strong emphasis on destiny but in purely secular terms – if there is the hand of God in any of this, she’s not telling.
Henry is easily the more appealing of the two characters, not just because of his condition but because he is a more interestingly complex personality. He is kind and loyal towards Clare, but he also has a more malevolent and aggressive side to his character.
Clare’s life , in contrast, revolves solely around her man to the point that her experiences are solely dictated by him; she’s not a particularly strong feminist role model.
Another weakness, is that its is never satisfactorily explained why Henry can hop back in time so easily but can rarely travel forward; the suspicion is that his brief sojourns into the future are tagged on merely to serve the interests of the plot.
Nevertheless, this is an intriguing and well written story with enough twists to keep the reader interested to the end. Time brings change, regrets and loss with the ultimate sadness being that it cannot be stopped.
