Going off on a Tangent

The Readit 2011 theme for June was Go Reads, and I thought that I’d read some travel guides to plan a holiday and some travel writers.  I even borrowed some from the library.  But I wasn’t in the right frame of mind to plan a holiday, or to read about other people’s travels.  I did dip into Jan Morris’ A Writers World: Travels 1950-2000 and enjoyed a few short pieces, but I didn’t recognise the Sydney that she wrote about, and quickly lost interest.

I decided that I needed to tackle the challenge from another perspective, and so turned to fiction.

The Hitchhikers Guide To The Galaxy was sitting on my bookshelf, marked for a re-read following Towel Day on the 25^th of May.  My cousin first introduced me to Douglas Adams writing when I was 16, when our extended family was snowed in for more than a week in the English countryside.  No one could get in or out, and food and book supplies were dwindling.  We were surviving on cup-a-soups and I’d read my way through my grandmothers collection Catherine Cookson and Readers Digest condensed novels.  The Hitchhikers Guide was a revelation.  It was funny and thought provoking, and most definitely a different type of book to Tilly Trotter. 

Rereading the Hitchhikers guide, 25 years later, having read all Douglas Adam’s sequels, knowing the trials and tribulations ahead of Arthur Dent, knowing how long he’d have to wait to get a decent cup of tea, was a revelation all over again.  The writing, the ideas, the lunacy, are as strong and fresh as ever. 

Sticking with the fantasy travel theme, I decided that it was time to broaden my understanding of time travel.  Alison Uttley’s A Traveller in Time was a childhood favourite I’m a big fan of Connie Willis and Audrey Niffenegger’s The Time Traveller’s Wife.  A quick search of my library’s catalogue confirmed that time travel crops up far more often in children’s books than it does in books for adults.  I chose two books that were currently available: The Boy I Loved Before by Jenny Colgan (also published as Do You Remember the First Time) and Robert J Sawyer’s Flashforward. 

Bumping into an old boyfriend at a wedding, Colgan’s main character, Flora, realises how dissatisfied she is with her job, her fiancée and life in general.  She wishes she could go back in time to make different choices, and is promptly transported back one month in time and transformed into a 16 year old schoolgirl, living with her parents again.  The story then revolves around Flora trying to fit in as a sixteen year old, encountering mean girls and making a friend at school, preventing her parent’s marriage break up, and sleeping with her ex boyfriends younger brother.  At the end of the month, Flora again attends the wedding, and transforms back into her 30something self, to find that her parents marriage has been saved, her unwanted fiancée conveniently wants to marry someone else, and the old boyfriend is still attracted to her – as is his younger brother who finds her strangely familiar.  I found this a messy and unsatisfying read.  The different elements of the story seemed glued together rather than integrated, and consequently, the conveniently tidy ending for all (one bridegroom substituted for another in the space of a month with no unhappy feelings!) was unbelievable. Far from being the type of sympathetic character you want things to turn out for, Flora is selfish and unlikable, especially in her treatment of the friend she makes as a 16 year old.

Sawyer’s Flashforward deals with freak series of events involving the particle accelerator at CERN that results in the entire human race “flashing” forward to experience a few minutes of their life twenty years in the future.  The characters then cope with the consequences of the flashforward, struggling to work out if the future is inevitable, or with foreknowledge, it can be changed.  This is  a wonderful set up, and I can understand why it appealed to the makers of the TV series it inspired, unfortunately, it does not live up to its promise.  Firstly, Sawyer spends a lot of time explaining and making the science plausible, in a clumsy way that intrudes upon, rather than enhances the storyline.  I would have been happy to accept that the flashforward happened, as a matter of suspended  disbelief. I don’t need to know the detail necessary to recreate the event in my own backyard. 

Secondly, Sawyers characters are one dimensional, obsessed with themselves and lacking empathy for everyone, even those you’d expect them to care for deeply.  As a result they are not just unlikeable, but unbelievable.  They feel like “types” or cogs in a narrative machine, rather than real people with real feelings.   One character, obsessed with “solving” his own future murder, hounds a traumatised young boy for details of an autopsy he witnessed in the flashforward, and barely registers the distress of his brother who is on the verge of suicide.  Another leaves strangers to care for the body of his stepdaughter, who dies as a result of the flashforward, in case he is needed back to work. Most jarring was the language used by a 30 year old character to describe the body of a 50 year old they saw in flashforward.  I’m willing to believe that a 30 year old man might not find a 50 year old woman attractive, but to describe her as a “hag”, and her body as like “fruit gone bad” seems excessive.