tl;dr

Another excellent novella from Tor with an eye-popping cover.

opening remarks

There was never any question that I was going to read Time Was by Ian McDonald, but that gorgeous cover would have persuaded me if I’d had any doubts.

knee-jerk observations

A fantastic opening sentence:

Tom is a signalman for the British Army during WW2.  He is also a poet, “thought odd even for signals”.  Tom is having a pint at his local pub when a group of scientists arrive.  He is immediately drawn to one of the new arrivals; it’s love at first sight:

In the present day, a bibliophile with an interest in books published during WW2 discovers a collection of verse in a second- hand bookstore.  Between the pages of the book is a love letter from Tom (our signalman) and Ben:

A panto blowjob.  Sexy and naughty!

In his research of Tom and Ben, Emmett (our bibliophile’s name) meets up with Thorn Hildreth whose great-grandfather had dealings with the two lovers.  Amongst her great grandfathers’ wartime records and possessions is a photo taken in Egypt that features both Tom and Ben.  This leads Emmett and Thorn to London, and in particular, the Imperial War Museum where diary entries from an Indian soldier fighting in Turkey during the First World War and a still from a film of a massacre in Bosnia in the mid-90s leads Thorn to draw the following conclusion:

McDonald beatifically encapsulates that transition from friend to lover:

For time-travel related reasons Tom and Ben have been transported to war zones at different points in history.  As a witness to the atrocities and butchery at Nanking Tom tells Ben in a letter that he is immune but not immunised.  The violence can’t touch him, but Tom still feels the full effect.

For Emmett, time travel is such an outrageous concept that even God might be a possibility.  I laughed.

The Gist Of It

Ian McDonald’s Time Was is a beautiful, well-observed novella about war and love but also (and maybe most important of all, at least to me) the lost joy of picking up a novel in a second-hand bookstore and smelling its age, appreciating the decades stored in its yellowed pages.  I find it fitting that a time-travel story should feature an old book, not as a magical MacGuffin but as the physical (as distinct from quantum) thread that binds two lovers together.

The story is mostly set in the present day detailing Emmett’s search for evidence of Tom and Ben.  The way he pieces it all together, with the help of Thorn, is page-turning stuff and yet I could have done with more from Tom’s perspective, set in the past.  His chapters are much shorter and only provide a glimpse into his affair with Ben, how they met, how they fell in love. And while, Tom’s letters to Ben that Emmett finds stuck between the pages of Time Was (the book, not the novella), provide a little more detail, it seems a missed opportunity that Emmett never discovers a letter from Ben to Tom.

Still, I did like how Emmett grows from a fusty, pretentious bibliophile into a man deeply invested in charting Tom and Ben’s appearances throughout history.  It’s an obsession, but one that provides Emmett with a clear sense and purpose.  The novella is also unflinching in how it depicts war, Tom’s letter describing the slaughter of Nanking is powerful, intense and depressing.  Tom, at this point, has witnessed the savagery of war throughout history; this instinctual compulsion to embrace violence and eradication rather than peace and co-existence.

While I could have done with more Tom and Ben and their love for each other, this is a still a terrific time travel novella, another big tick for the Tor novella range.