Time AFTER TIME
ETERNAL YOUTH MAY NOT BE AS APPEALING AS IT’S CRACKED UP TO BE
Idon’t know if I’ve ever read a novel quite like HowtoStop Time. It’s fantastical, but at the same time, filled with truths about life and love.
The plot is a spin on the classic time travel story. Tom Hazard has a rare condition. He ages incredibly slowly. Even though he was born more than 400 years ago, he’s still only sprouted a single grey hair. He will grow old eventually but generations of people will live and die in the meantime.
This presents Tom with some major problems. People notice his unusual youthfulness and distrust it – hence his mother is drowned as a witch. Eventually, he discovers there is a secret society of people with the same condition and, with their help, spends the centuries moving from place to place, adopting different identities. It’s a lonely life since the one rule is that he mustn’t fall in love – although, of course, Tom breaks it.
From Shakespeare’s London to Paris in the Jazz Age, Tom sees it all. Now craving a dull and ordinary existence, he is working as a history teacher in today’s London, telling the kids about the amazing eras he has lived through – although they can’t know why he’s got such a gift for bringing the past alive.
I loved this book. It’s shot through with sadness and filled with humour. Some novels with a quirky central concept can be too smart for their own good, but this one has too much heart for that.
And even though it darts back and forth in time, and features a gaggle of well-known historical figures, it never becomes disorienting.
While it’s a smooth, fun read filled with action and adventure, that’s all underpinned with plenty of thoughtfulness. Longevity may seem very appealing, but not when there is no-one for you to share all that extra time with.
Actor Benedict Cumberbatch has already snapped up the film rights to the best-selling HowtoStopTime and I can see why – it would make a cracker of a movie for him to star in.
‘ People notice his unusual youthfulness and distrust it – hence his mother is drowned as a witch’