This week I have two fellow bloggers to thank for this one – as usual John from the Sound of One Hand Typing, who suggested the writing prompt (“book reviews”) and also Keith, the Nostalgic Italian who is a prolific reader and led me to this particular one, writing a full-length review of it a couple of years back.
The most recent book I finished reading was Matt Haig’s How To Stop Time. Arguably it fits the book itself, as it seems I could be reading it hungrily for an hour or so at a time and it would feel like just a few minutes had passed. It’s quite good and thought-provoking indeed.
About two years back, I read Haig’s Midnight Library, and thought it was quite excellent too, that one dealing with a depressed young woman who essentially got the chance to go and briefly step into alternate realities and see her life as it would have been had she made different choices. Ultimately she realizes she probably was just where she was meant to be after all.
How to Stop Time is equally interesting in concept. Its protagonist, Tom (much of the time) has a secret. A secret so big, he has to have a secret identity. You see, this rather mild-mannered English high school teacher is old. People figure he’s middle-aged… he has one or two gray hairs popping in. But he is old. Not “he saw the Doors play live” old, a fan of Shakespeare old. Not because he liked reading Shakespeare’s plays, because he was a friend of Shakespeare’s and The Bard once saved him in a brawl. He was born sometime in the 1500s. Tom however, has a different metabolism, to say the least and ages slowly. Very slowly. Problem is, back when he was young, people in the Middle Ages village thought it was unnatural (well…) and thus deemed his mom a witch and quickly killed her off as such. Tom soon learned that he was going to be deemed a freak should others figure out that he, more or less, never got older. So his life was spent moving from place to place, hoping to not be recognized.
Along the way, he finds there are some others like him, and they have a secret organization. Forget the Masons, the Albas are the “it”. People hundreds of years old, looking fairly spry, ruled by one even older Alba who had the wisdom and years of connections to provide them with new identities, false Ids, get them jobs…but ruled their day to day life. His main rule was keep moving, and don’t fall in love. You can’t have a 300 year old man who looks 23 fall for a similarly aged girl… in a couple of deccades, people would recognize she was now middle-aged, but he was still the same old 23 year old (maybe 24 by now) with movie star looks. People would talk. And the boss wanted more than anything to avoid “talk”. Being discovered.
Predictably, for the second time in about 400 years, Tom falls in love. And his lover finds out his secret. Will his loyalty be to her (and one other Alba friend whose life he’d saved centuries earlier) or to his all-knowing, all-powerful boss?
It’s really a page-turner … and that’s from a guy who isn’t the biggest novel reader. Typically I go for non-fiction. But when fiction gets me thinking this much and wanting to keep reading , that goes out the window. Would I want to live into the centuries? On the one hand, I could see the world. Feel like learning to play the cello? What’s stopping you – you have all the time in the world! On the other hand, always looking over your shoulder, listening for gossip about you and worse, knowing anyone you love will probably die off in what to you is a span of “months”? A tough trade-off.
“How to Stop time”. Recommended. Read it, then wait for the apparent forthcoming movie.
Everydave Life 