STRANDED IN TIME
An Ocean of Minutes tells intensely human story through prism of a perilous new world
An Ocean of Minutes Thea Lim Viking
“People wishing to time travel go to Houston Intercontinental Airport …” That’s how Thea Lim wanted to begin her ambitious new novel, An Ocean of Minutes. But she also suspected she was letting herself in for a heap of trouble by choosing science fiction as the prism for the book she wanted to write. She had more on her mind than just a love story. An Ocean of Minutes is also a cautionary tale about the perils of a global economy. So writing it was no picnic. “It was terrible. It was awful.” The 37-year-old Toronto author can laugh about it now during an interview in her publisher’s office. The novel arrives in the wake of some glowing early notices. Kirkus Reviews, for example, has hailed it as a “beautiful” piece of work.
“It took years,” says Lim, who confesses she first started on the book in 2011. “I got to the first 40 pages and then I probably had to rewrite them at least 18 times. It was difficult to launch — figuring out the details of this world and where the story was going.”
She knew where her characters would end up, but “having a good idea and being able to execute it are two different things.”
The trigger for the story is a deadly flu pandemic and its effect on two young lovers, Frank and Polly. When Frank is stricken and Polly is desperate to save him, she signs up with a mysterious company called TimeRaiser that sends healthy people like herself on a one-way trip into the future to work as bonded labourers in exchange for life-saving treatment for their dying loved ones. But a disastrous digital error scuppers plans for Polly and Frank to reunite in Texas in 12 years time.
Instead she has been projected an additional five years into a scabrous landscape in which her homeland is now divided into two countries — the United States and America — and in which the worst excesses of global inequality and social deprivation now reign paramount.
In creating this world, Lim placed an intensely human story at its core — a grieving Polly’s determination against seemingly impossible odds to be reunited with Frank.
“At first I was trying to animate grief, which is not the most exciting topic,” Lim says. “Then I thought of stranding someone in time because when you’re bereaved, that’s what it can feel like. It was really accidental that I stumbled across it ... and then I became very interested in the whole genre of time travel and all its possibilities.”
However, the novel is also about human tenacity in the face of hostile forces — political, social and economic. An Ocean of Minutes is shadowed by menace, so if readers are reminded of George Orwell’s 1984 and Franz Kafka’s The Trial, Lim will be happy.
“Orwell’s one of my great heroes,” she says. “That one-way phone that makes some appearances is definitely inspired by 1984.”
TimeRaiser, the company Polly works for in bonded servitude, seems all the more sinister because the reader is never completely certain what it does. “One of the things that interests me is how much suffering is caused by corporations in our world,” Lim says. “It’s not actually through malicious intent but often through negligence in not really caring about the supply chain and all that. Polly never meets an evil CEO or anything like that — yet it’s a corporation that’s uncaringly destroying her life.”
Polly ’s time trip has stranded her in Galveston, once a popular tourist resort, but in the novel a blighted horror that suits TimeRaiser’s needs. Lim used to visit the Texas City when she was a student at the University of Houston.
“It’s a place in constant rebirth,” she says. So she found it fascinating to create an “alternate” Galveston for her purposes.
“The idea is that everybody has left because the south was basically declared a bio-zone where everyone was sick and people were fleeing.”
The novel offers a vision of a downtown Galveston that is the equivalent of “a car crash scene that hasn’t been cleared.” And the only people interested in reoccupying it are executives from TimeRaiser who see commercial potential in its desolation.
Lim uses time travel as an analogy for immigration. And in the plight of Polly, essentially a migrant, she hopes to draw attention to the real world and what migrant workers have been experiencing within a global economy for decades.
“It’s seems to me that when you immigrate it is a kind of time travel because you leave behind your homeland as it is — and that is as much a geographical space as a temporal space. You can never really return home. That’s what I was wanting to explore ... and it’s really interesting to me that it’s also obvious to many people that it’s a love story.”
At the same she’s startled by the novel’s unexpected topicality.
“I started writing it so long ago that’s it’s odd to me that it touches on schisms and problems that Americans are really grappling with now.”
Lim, an award-winning journalist and author, has one previous novel to her credit — The Same Woman, published in 2007. But she says An Ocean of Minutes belongs in a different category. Indeed, there’s a sense that she’s still coming to grips herself with the breadth of territory she actually covers.
“It can be read as about a number of different things. It’s a relationship story, a love story. It’s about how everyone we love will leave us or die … what I was trying to say is that love is terrible because it opens us up to these catastrophic losses, yet without love we’re not really human. But it’s also about how the forces of history and the economy shape the terrible choices we make.”