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The Time Traveller’s Wife by Audrey Niffenegger – Untimely Book Review

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You thought my review of Genus was tardy? Well, I’ve topped that: this Untimely Book Review covers The Time Traveller’s Wife by Audrey Niffenegger, which has a battered sticker on the cover pledging allegiance to Richard & Judy’s Book Club 2005!

But I remember when this damn book was everywhere, so I’m hoping a few of you have read it. Let’s talk!

This is one of those amazing high-concept stories where the premise is in the title, but I’ll break it down anyway: this covers the meeting, wedding and more of Henry and Clare, out of order, because Henry has a strange genetic disorder causing random time travel. (No, I don’t consider their marriage a spoiler. For some unknown reason.)

That’s really kinda it. It’s romance with a sci-fi twist, and for about the first half, I was enjoying it. The out-of-sequence courtship was sweet, and there are enough clever uses of time travel thrown in to make it appealing to people like me, who are reading because they like soft sci-fi/Doctor Who, and want to see what the fuss was about.

Of course, the romance boot eventually drops as it was always going to. The inventive time-twisting continues to the very end, to be fair, but angst and melodrama kick in damn hard too. If you want to believe that life won’t immediately become miserable once you get married, don’t read this book, because that’s more or less the plot.

Oh, and Henry is a very obvious hot-indie-kid character at times. Yes, Niffenegger goes out of her way to say how damaged he is, but never makes it matter, because Clare will inevitably fix him. That’s one downside of the ongoing pre-determination theme, I suppose. Saps drama.

Which brings me to the ending (NON-SARCASTIC SPOILERS NOW) where the inevitable happens and then the book just stops, all character threads except the Henry/Clare relationship hanging in mid-air. It reads more like a memoir than a real novel, and if that’s what you’re trying to do, then fair enough, but I like novels to feel more plotted.

I feel bad looking back over this review, because there were lengthy spells, even in the grim second half, when I was genuinely enjoying this book. I’ve probably made it sound like the whole thing was drudgery, but if the central idea of “romance with sci-fi twist” completely appeals, it’s probably worth reading. I’m just not much of a romance reader.

I say all this as if everyone who cares hasn’t already read it, of course. But if you can remember what you thought of this book, feel free to disagree with me in the comments.

Friday short story time: "Death Ray"

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Does this count as another stab at science-fiction? Not sure. The concepts are certainly in there. It’s something, none the less.

Death Ray

By Nick Bryan

Professor Sharp took a few steps back, sweating in the heat, and looked at his creation. It had taken him seven years, a number of false starts and a missing leg, not to mention a finger, but he had finally created the genuine ray gun.

Modelled after all the science fiction books and drawings of his youth, it had a sharp muzzle, in fact the whole theme was unmistakably triangular. He’d polished the metal until it gleamed, to make sure the air of science fiction beauty was unmistakable.

Admittedly, the shinier his new creation became, the more it stood out against the rest of his laboratory space. He’d poured most of his funds into keeping the weapon beautiful, purchasing enough laser components to give it a real kick., and meanwhile the workbenches were rotting in summer damp.

It had taken a lot of hard work to forge all the necessary paperwork to register himself as six different fake laser eye surgeons, but now he had all the zap crap he could ever need. And at last, he had done it. His very own high-powered laser death ray.

Not that he knew what to do with it. That was the really stupid thing. Sharp wouldn’t hurt a fly. He didn’t want a death ray so he could kill things. He just thought they looked cool.

He picked his creation up and hefted it at a workbench. But no, he couldn’t even bring himself to annihilate a wooden item of furniture that was already rotting. Pathetic.

But it was still hot in here. Very deliberately not thinking about it too hard, Sharp turned to face the tiny window and pulled the trigger. Not being used to firing weapons, he flew off his feet, as the massive unprecedented blast ripped out of one spindly hand.

He kept hold of the gun, but ended up smashing his body straight through that damp-ridden workbench. Thankfully all the sharp tools had been put away, Sharp was very safety conscious.

However, he had also successfully created a huge hole at one end of his dingy warehouse, around three times the size of the original window. As he felt the cool breeze begin to roll over his face, he mentally marked this experiment off as a success.

Written by me, no stealing, y’know, that sort of thing.

“It’s All… Papery” – Returning To Print Books

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I’ve had a Kindle for a year, and it’s fast become my primary method of reading. I love the interface, the convenience, the way I don’t have to fill up any more space with piles of books, which attract dust in vast quantities and give me allergy seizures.

So, yes, I am an ereader convert. But some people, my so-called friends, are behind me on the development scale and keep lending me books made of dead trees. I finished one such novel the other day and thought I’d share some thoughts on my re-entry onto paper.

Get Some Physio

Considering how much Kindle hatred there is out there, you’d expect picking up a real book to be a revelatory experience, making the story a million times better and exuding some magic smell. (Because it’s always about the smell, isn’t it? Hey, guys, computers can have odour too, especially when the cooling fan fails and the motherboard burns.)

But you know, I didn’t notice much different. Yes, it’s weird measuring your progress in page numbers again, rather than abstract percentages, and feeling a physical change under your right hand as the plot falls away. And flicking through regular books to check stuff for your reviews is way easier, that is one big plus point for them.

But you know what I have to do with paper books? Protect the fragile little darlings from getting bashed around, especially this one that wasn’t mine, find my place manually rather than automatically, carry a heavier rucksack, accept that other people on the tube can see what I’m reading. (Fortunately, it wasn’t porn, it was The Time Traveller’s Wife. Untimely Book Review to follow.)

Get Some Therapy

So, inane revelation time: books and ereaders are different in some ways and not others. And, yes, there are problems with Kindle brand dominance – I’m not a huge fan of Amazon being the only place I can easily buy stuff.

But. I’d rather we talk about actual issues like that, rather than throwing a tantrum about methods of reading. It’s just data, and I say this as an experienced IT professional. I’ve always been insistent that how I display and consume my data is up to me, ever since I was a little boy and my Mum tried to make me read the Radio Times instead of using Teletext. (Sorry, American readers, I may have lost you there.)

And speaking of young kids: people who do things like refer to the Kindle as “the K-word”? Not a great look, folks.

So, where do you stand on the Kindle/book debate? Have you gone back to books, and did you experience whiplash? Comment! Below!

(And yes, I took that picture of my Kindle on top of a pile of books. I know, I know, the layers of meaning are stunning.)

Friday short story time: "Contact"

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In this week’s story, it’s another all-dialogue effort, only days after I wrote a blog post about how much I love dialogue. Wow, it’s almost like I actually plan this stuff.

Also inspired by my friend Alastair using contactless card payments at the branch of Pret where I was trying to think of a story. I’m simple and easily influenced sometimes.

Anyway, let’s go!

Contact

By Nick Bryan

‘Sir, I see from your card that you can now use contactless payments!’

‘Come again?’

‘Contactless, sir. You touch your card here, the payment goes through and you don’t have to type in your PIN number.’

‘But what if I want to?’

‘Type in a number?’

‘Put my card in the machine. Like I have done for years. It took years to adjust to even that.’

‘Sir, you’re buying a newspaper, three bread rolls and a can of Diet Irn-Bru. Surely for such a small purchase, you may as well…’

‘Maybe I enjoy the interaction, young lady. What do you think of that?’

‘Sir, I’m sorry if I’ve upset you, the PIN pad’s right here if you want to…’

‘Perhaps I get a small twinge of pleasaure from coming to your shop and speaking to you ladies for a few minutes about the affairs of the day whilst waiting for that huge calculator to take my money.’

‘Well, I certainly didn’t mean to belittle…’

‘And another thing, whatever happened to the customer is always right, eh? I come in here, wanting nothing more than to go through the day as I normally do, and you can’t leave me be can you?’

‘I’d be happy to call my supervisor over so you can talk to him inst… I mean make a formal complaint.’

‘What’s next exactly? Are you going to force an iPhone down my throat?’

‘Sir, I really can only apologise if I have upset you, but the queue behind you is getting rather long now. I’ve got the total value of your shopping at £1.70, I will pay for it in cash out of my own pocket now if you promise to leave quickly and quietly.’

‘In cash?’

‘Yes.’

‘Not card?’

‘I promise, sir.’

‘Okay. I’ll allow it.’

‘That’s very generous of you, sir.’

And so Frederick Fox left the corner shop, having used that method to get a free newspaper from different shops every day for a week. Tomorrow, he would finally be caught out after he tried to get a bagutte instead of the bread rolls.

Copyright me 2012, no swiping, email me if you want, etc. Frederick Fox is such an obvious name that I am sure it must be from somewhere, but can’t remember where right now. Is he a superhero? Is he… Fox-Man?

Dialogue – The Writer’s Crack?

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Close followers of my work here, specifically the Friday stories, might note I’ve done a few in an all-dialogue format. Like this one, also one of my only “science-fiction” stories. Or kinda this one too. And the new one I’ve just written for Friday. So clearly I’m a big fan.

It’s just easy to write, isn’t it? Flows off the tongue like, well, speech. Maybe it’s the hours I spent reading those Aaron Sorkin script books, but I kinda love it. Unfortunately, I also worry I enjoy it too much sometimes. (Hence the title – apologies if anyone was expect an ode to the creative arse.)

“Ah, Rupert, I see you are removing the badger from the toaster.”

This is the biggest issue I have when writing largely in dialogue, and I’ve been knocked around for it by tutors: the danger of getting over-theatrical.

This results in characters saying things like the above, basically filling in for the absence of prose or stage directions. After all, the reader won’t know what’s going on if the characters don’t state it, but they also end up talking in a way no-one does in real life.

On the other hand, this is a very specific problem. If you have any prose (or stage directions if you’re writing script) then, hey, problem solved.

“The angry badger has embedded itself in the wall whilst trying to extinguish the fire in its tail.”

Dialogue often has the fun bits, doesn’t it? This problem is particularly common in speed-writing projects like NaNoWriMo, but for me, it’s a never-ending battle: dialogue rolls off easily, prose requires hard work.

So, when editing, I end up chopping out a lot of the dialogue. Yes, even if that joke was awesome, sadly, it often isn’t necessary, so you have to kill your babies. (NOT LITERALLY FOR THE LOVE OF GOD.) I’ve also been writing more in the first person, which circumvents the problem by making narration more chatty. Clever, eh?

“Um, I don’t wanna, y’know, moan, but would someone reeeally put a badger in a toaster?”

It’s been established by smarter minds than me that fictional dialogue is rarely “realistic”. I may love the stylised dialogue of Aaron Sorkin, but people don’t really talk like that.

So we stumble across the distinction between “realistic” and “believable”. Strictly realistic dialogue would feature a lot of “um” and “kinda”, and reading it would be a nightmare. Awful BBC improv drama True Love featured actors improvising the banal conversations real people would have, and watching it was like dying and discovering hell is a never-ending bus queue.

So, in summation, dialogue is amazing, as long as it isn’t over-theatrical, over-used or too believable. Did I cover everything? What are your dialogue issues? Feel free to comment below, I need fodder for the follow-up post.

Friday short story time: "Scarlet Letters"

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Hello!

Tiring schedule at the moment, but the MA portfolio is slowly getting cranked out, as is a bunch of internet material. Most recently, I did a slightly mocking TV news summary for The Digital Fix, which I think came out okay and may even do again in the future if I have time.

Oh, and on Tuesday on this very website, I reviewed the sci-fi novel Genus. And I’m about to post a short story I wrote about not-really-politics. Now, if someone could just edit my novel for me…?

Scarlet Letters

By Nick Bryan

My name is Richard Redmond, and every year on the fourth of June, I send a postcard in a red envelope to my local MP, with a smear of blood across the middle of the writing space.

It’s not my whole life, just part of it. After all, doesn’t take long. But after the first two or three years, started to panic a little. Forensic technology was advancing, so I wore gloves whenever I touched the postcards, which meant buying them in winter so I didn’t look weird in the shop.

The postcards were a range of themes, didn’t particularly matter, and the envelopes bought in multipacks, which was nice. It meant I could buy them and touch the packaging, as long as I was careful not to graze the contents. So I could buy the envelopes any time of year.

And then I had to find a different kind of blood, in case they took DNA from my blood samples. I started using cow blood, squeezed out of fresh butcher’s meat, and then I cooked the joint up for my wife and kids.

My constituency is in Norfolk, but I didn’t want him to pin me down, so I sent it from a different town every time. During a spell of unemployment, had to save for a while to get train fare to Edinburgh together. Could’ve just used somewhere closer, but I’d had a plan. Numbered a few locations and then randomised the numbers using an online generator.

Of course, a couple years back, my MP was voted out by the Tories. He’d been in power for a while, Labour were being swept aside, and it left me with a decision to make. Did the new guy inherit the letters or did the routine demand I stick with one man?

I thought about that for a long time. So much so that I narrowly missed a kid whilst driving home from work. But eventually, at eight in the evening on the fourth of June, I decided it had to be him. Found his office address online and got on with it.

I thought this might be the turning point for him, the postcards continuing when he left the job. I kept waiting for them to come and find me, catch me, give me my moment. Why did you do it? I knew they’d ask me that. Why the blood? Why the red? Why nearly a decade?

Of course, the clue was the postcards. I’ve never forgiven the fucking politicians since one of their massive conferences ruined my holiday in Brighton in 1988. But I never got to tell them this, because they never came. They probably thought it was politically motivated, just because the blood makes it look impassioned.

Well, fuck them. I’ve never voted in my life.

Copyright me 2012, hello, email me if you like, but please don’t enclose a blood sample.