How to Stop Time by Matt Haig

Read by Mark Meadows

I am a sucker for time travel stories and vampire stories.

What I often love best about vampire novels and movies is the rich, specific melancholy of the very long-lived—the friends and lovers lost in the depths of centuries; the layered memories of cities as they change through their life cycle while you go on, unchanging; the sense of displacement when the culture that formed you no longer exists. What I love about time travel books is being vicariously plopped, with all of my modern sensibilities, into another time.

How to Stop Time isn’t a vampire book or a time-travel book. It’s about a bloke named Tom Hazard. He’s not a blood-sucking monster and doesn’t have access to any technology that lets him mess with the fabric of space-time. He’s actually a pretty average guy, apart from one thing—due to a rare genetic condition, he doesn’t age at the same rate as the rest of us. He’s been alive for centuries, but doesn’t look a day over 41.

As we read we learn about his childhood, and how he became aware of his condition, and what a danger it was to those around him. Tom’s mother was killed as a witch when people started to notice that he had been 13 years old for an awfully long time, for example. And of course he himself is in danger of being torn apart by mobs or vivisected for science or, at best, thrown in a loony bin, depending on the era and area he’s in. He gradually learns to lie low and never, ever fall in love.

Except he did fall in love, once, when he was a young man. His beloved is long dead as the novel opens, but the daughter they had together, who inherited his longevity, has disappeared. Tom has been searching for her for centuries, with the help of the Albatross Society, a shadowy group of people who share Tom’s condition. They’re a helpful bunch, helping their members acquire new lives and new identities every eight years so that they can live unmolested. All the Albatross Society asks in exchange is the occasional favor.

Tom isn’t actually crazy about performing these favors, but whenever he thinks about backing out of the society, he thinks about his beloved daughter and how they are helping him locate her, and he sticks around. Fingering his many memories like beads on a rosary, avoiding falling in love, and meanwhile rubbing elbows with the likes of William Shakespeare and Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald.

This is a book that held a lot of charms for me. Tom isn’t some superguy; he’s just this bloke who happens to have this genetic condition which has been, yes, a blessing to him, but also, at times, a curse. There’s an extent to which all that elbow-rubbing with famous people starts to feel a little Forrest-Gumpish, but really, if you were writing a time travel book--okay, a book in which your protagonist travels through a lot of time—would you really be able to resist putting them in intriguing historical situations or having them meet intriguing historical personages? And the author doesn’t overdo it.

My main beef with this book is that Tom seems a trifle naive for somebody with plural centuries under his belt. But I love the way his personality develops, over time, into a modern one, and the flashbacks to previous eras are so skillfully written that I felt I’d been whisked right there.

A fun piece of speculative fiction; file under Ripping Yarns for Melancholy Temperaments.