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.
