I have never liked time travel. Episodes of science fiction TV that deal with it tend to give me a headache because I can’t wrap my mind around it and start thinking in circles.
But I loved this book. It’s been around for a while and also had a movie based on it, but for those who don’t know, it’s about Henry and Clare. Henry is an involuntary time traveler; he has no control over where or when he travels, although it typically seems to be to important people or events from his past and future. When he travels, he always ends up naked because he can’t bring anything with him in either direction. This often leads to dangerous situations and Henry has learned to pick locks, shoplift, etc. so that he can survive when he travels. A doctor discovers that the time traveling is the result of a genetic disorder.
Clare is Henry’s wife. Despite the title, the novel is equally about each of them and their grand romance. It’s told in first person and their perspectives alternate. Clare spends a lot of time waiting. Henry spends a lot of time longing to be with Clare. This is set up in the prologue, in which Clare notes “I wait for Henry, not knowing where he is, wondering if he’s okay. It’s hard to be the one who stays. I keep myself busy. Time goes faster that way.” At the end of Henry’s section of the prologue, he describes how it’s “Clare, always Clare. . . I hate to be where she is not, when she is not. And yet, I am always going, and she cannot follow.”
I have to give major kudos to Niffenegger for being able to keep all of the dates, times, and time-based information straight. It would make my head spin. The novel takes place in the past, present, and future, but not linearly. Niffenegger provides the date and the ages of Henry and Clare in each scene. Sometimes the ages are far apart (e.g., when Henry is 36 and Clare is 6), sometimes they are 8 years apart when they are in the present (i.e., “real time”). When Clare is 6 and Henry is 36, she is meeting him for the first time, but he is not meeting her for the first time because they are married in the future. When Henry meets Clare for the first time, in real time, she is 20 and he is 28, and he doesn’t recognize her, but she knows him from childhood. See what I mean?
There were times I just had to stop analyzing and just roll with it. I think I was helped by how Niffenegger sets up the idea of time travel. Basically, you can’t change something in the future by going into the past. Occasionally a character tries, but it doesn’t work. This helped my head spin a little less since I didn’t have to think about cause and effect as much.
The Time Traveler’s Wife isn’t really about time travel. Obviously is has a lot of time travel in it, but really this is about Henry and Clare’s relationship and how the time travel affects it. I enjoyed reading it and found myself going to bed far too late one night because I had trouble putting it down. Niffenegger is expecting to come out with a sequel this year, and I may consider reading that, as well, even though the focus is on a different character.