(courtesy Ultimo Press)
Good lord but I love books which go deep and hard and yet which still manage to feel light and accessible too.
There’s a real art to investing huge amounts of meaningful heart and drama into stories with a fantastical airy premise and it’s clear pretty much from the start that Jaclyn Moriarty has the gift for spinning light and dark, charmingly funny and darkly introspective into one utterly beguiling, rather wonderful story.
Time Travel For Beginners may possess a winsome title, one that suggest all manner of frothily fun adventures, but as you get to know the people in the orbit of the Time Travel Agency which sits in a unremarkable storefront on a busy road in a suburb in Sydney’s Northern Beaches, it becomes clear that this escapist sounding premise actually holds a multitude of emotional deep diving moments within.
So many in fact as the story goes in ways sublimely lovely and promising and intensely soul-scouringly intense but always intensely, captivatingly imaginative, Time Travel For Beginners becomes the sort of utterly involving story that you can’t put down.
What starts out as the story of single mum Anna getting a job at the Agency right when she needs a wholly different place of employment where she meets Teddy, a handsome and sweet man who is trying to recover from the end of his marriage (not his fault at all) soon becomes an ambitiously big and epic story which asks some mightily expansive questions.
I hung up the phone.
Huh, I thought–and my thoughts were shaking violently. No going back this time.
But though Time Travel For Beginners is blockbuster in scale, scope and storytelling ambition, it always stays emotional intimate where it matters, offering a story which though fantastically clever and breathtakingly original, feels like an indie drama with heart and humour, lightness and darkness, and the promise of better days to come when it seems only great sadness lines the horizon.
But that’s not what captures your eye at first.
Initially, Time Travel For Beginners feel like some sort of grand adventure offering the chance for everyone involved in the story to find some way out of the various kinds of pain, both old and new, which have captured people like Anna and Teddy in ways they aren’t aware of and likely couldn’t undo even if they were.
In this extraordinarily brilliant story, what you notice first and what grabs the attention is that the Time Travel Agency can take you anywhere in history with no fear that anything you do there can damage your present; so you can go for long chatty walks with Jane Austen, see if you can find when they built Stonehenge or witness the Olympics in ancient Greece.
It’s a fantastically exciting idea but while some people want to see the big ticket moments of history, others nursing the injurious effects of great loss and heartache simply want to see someone they’ve lost or relive moments lost to the fuzziness of memories which it turns out can be quite deceptive in their recollective veracity.
(courtesy official author site)
Whatever the longing or need when someone comes to the Time Travel Agency, where it seems that the technology that underpins it all is very real indeed – though the inventor, a lovely, motherly Eastern European scientist named Dr Katya Nastevski is happy to let the wider world think it’s all fanciful rubbish – it serves a purpose and while it doesn’t always provide what the traveller is seeking, it is an excitingly promising avenue to pursue because of what might be possible.
It’s this pool of great possibility which entices Anna to begin going back in history to meet her literary heroes, and Teddy to figure out why his wife Navi left him for someone uncomfortably close to him, and for a while it delivers on all that promise and offera great happiness to Anna and much-need answers for a bewildered and deeply hurt Teddy.
But life has a way of refusing to let things be quietly and easily dealt with and soo enough events overtake Anna and Teddy and both must reckon with what happens when seemingly small and innocuous moments turn out to be very big and huge impactful later on down the road.
Through all of the nuanced and thoughtfully empathetic twists and turns of Time Travel For Beginners, we are treated to a comforting sense, and this might seem counter intuitive at first, that some things defined easy solace, answers or comfort.
Why would that be a good thing? Well, frankly it’s not but it means that rather than having an easy way out of where they are, Anna, Teddy and others like the mysterious Jade Giovane whose life has eerie parallels to Anna’s, are going to have to work hard for where destiny might take them.
I’d felt it all day without acknowledging it. They were their usual selves – Joon, polite and soft-spoken; Roberto, conically grumpy to enthused and back–and the content of their conversation was innocuous. Yet something was slightly out of tune.
Had they been touched by the uneasiness, too?
What strikes you most about this gorgeously told, funny, trippy and heartfelt novel, which feels light and bright yes, but with a world of emotion swimming in its searingly felt depths, is that it seems to know what ails us, what can hurt us and what we need to find healing and freedom from past pain.
But as observed, its answers aren’t easy ones and while the time travel at the heart of the story offers the beguiling promise of easy answers and healing, it’s never that easy and can’t be that simple, and much of Time Travel For Beginners beautifully impactful storyline sits at that junction between simply expressed hope and hard-won healing.
It’s never an easy place in which to exist, and neither Anna nor Teddy, who might be each other’s answer in part in ways neither sees coming or understands at first, nor any of the other people who seek the Agency’s services can make it any easier though they try hard to do so.
In the end, the magic of Time Travel For Beginners is that it knows how darkly scarring pain and past trauma can be, how thrilling it would be if going back in time could fix it all in an instant, but also how the path to the next stages of our life must be lived and experienced, fought for and be lost and won in equal measure, and that all that needs to take places in the trenches of raw humanity where all that matters in an open heart, understanding of where we are and a willingness and hope to get to where we could go next.