The Time Traveler’s Wife, by Audrey Niffenegger

When I started reading this book, the way in which the lead male protagonist, a time-traveler (apparently the politically correct term is “chronologically deficient person”) named Henry spends over a decade preparing his future wife for their relationship between the ages of 6 and 18 showing up naked in the meadow outside the home where she lives with her privileged family and grooming her for the task of dating and then marrying him to be more than a bit troubling [1]. Henry is cultured, intelligent, has admirable tastes in art and music and literature, and is generally a nice enough guy except that he struggles with a host of vices that are connected to being the sort of person who travels in time without the ability to control where he goes, especially at moments of great stress. These vices include, but are not limited, to a great skill in breaking and entering [2] and theft as well as public nudity that leads him into fights and a lot of trouble with the police, who just don’t seem to understand his problem, which fortunately is the sort of problem that gives him the ability to escape police custody and imprisonment, a skill that would be enviable and useful for some of us, as well as the general unreliability that results from frequent and somewhat chaotic travel through time.

As a romance novel, and the successful first effort (successful enough to be turned into a moderately successful movie [3]), this book is graciously provided with some of the major influences on the author. Among these is another one of my favorite timey-wimey historical romances, Possession, by A.K. Wyatt. It is little surprise that the person who loaned the book for me to read is herself a Dr. Who fan (along with her three young daughters), as the plot is one that would be appreciated by someone who likes the conceit of someone who is able to travel back and forward in time and that is drawn to certain people and certain situations over and over again, like Groundhog Day [4] with a little bit less cynicism and a larger scope of time to deal with. There are, to be sure, quite a few moral quibbles that one can have about this book, including its justification of alcohol abuse, fornication (although it, mercifully, stops just shy of statutory rape), theft, disrespect for property, as well as the immoral and dissolute lives of the various friends and lovers, who are portrayed as being irreligious but socially progressive, tolerant enough to accept a time-traveling friend without any sort of moral judgment. This novel would have been better, if a bit more difficult for an author to conceive, if it would have explored a morally upright man’s travels through time, where he did not abuse the power to travel in time to win the lottery and also had friends who were decent and upstanding people. Sadly, most writers seem to have difficulty portraying those who strive for moral decency to be the sort of people who would be loving and understanding of those who struggle with such an obvious problem.

That said, this is a novel that is written with a great deal of skill and ingenuity (which is admittedly a rare quality in romance novels, which have the tendency to be rather formulaic because so many of them are written, making it hard to be original in any respect), and it is a novel that deals with some major philosophical and theological questions, even if inadvertently. To be sure, the novel deals rather explicitly with the problem of free will and determinism, showing the despair of a man who can see the past and (sometimes) the future, but who cannot change what is past, and whose efforts to make the past and future better only serve to more drastically entangle him in his fate. This book takes the stand that there is one universe, which opens up the potential for space-time paradoxes without allowing for the existence of multiple parallel universes, which would dissipate the meaning and longing inherent in the novel. Somewhat more inadvertently, the fact that the characters in the novel (and presumably also the author) are not particularly religious contradicts with the immense design that is evident both in the construction of the novel as a coherent whole as well as the obvious designing interests of the main characters in seeking to construct their own fate and influence its course by virtue of their decisions. Even if the novel itself has a very defective moral worldview, its very structure is itself an indirect indication of the sort of design that God has for the universe through the outworking of love, a most unintended result that gives this work some value to those who are in deep disagreement with the lifestyle and approach of its characters and author. It is likely that most readers of this work will be at least as inclined to appreciate the longing of its romantic plot without being so severe and critical on its defects. As a novel that deals inventively with questions of time, free will, love, family, death, art, and a host of related concerns, it is little wonder that so many people have praised it so highly, especially in comparison with the ordinary sort of romance literature that is being written in our time.

[1] http://edgeinducedcohesion.blog/2014/02/28/lovers-in-a-dangerous-time/

[2] http://edgeinducedcohesion.blog/2011/07/13/breaking-and-entering/

[3] http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0452694/

[4] http://edgeinducedcohesion.blog/2012/07/05/groundhog-day/