(courtesy Allen & Unwin Book Publishers)
In recent years, there has a been near-chronological avalanche of stories that make merry with ideas of time and space and use our increasing understanding of how these two concepts work and interact to spin some incredibly involved and immersively beguiling storytelling.
Having someone caught in a situation beyond the usual everyday, where dynamics and outcomes are not within easy normal control, if there’s even any control possible, makes for fascinating and emotionally engrossing storytelling which, by virtue of taking place in an extraordinary context, emphasise the ordinary, affecting humanity of the narrative all the more.
This narrative enhancing driver is unveiled in its full glory in Day Tripper by James Goodhand, where one very standard kind of English guy, Alex Dean, who, in 1995, dreams of studying at Cambridge University, being with the love of his life, Holly, and transcending a highly problematic childhood, suddenly finds himself grappling with a situation far beyond any understanding.
His staggeringly affecting, and deeply poignant time travel tale finds its genesis one night when he is beaten by an abusive bully from his past, while on a date night with Holly even more cruelly, and he finds himself sinking into the Thames River and almost drowning.
That he doesn’t is some kind of miracle, but any thanks to whatever god/s he believes in that he’s still alive is raggedly tempered by the fact that he awakes the next morning in a derelict room in 2010 looking far worse for wear, the last instantly-passing fifteen years having clearly taken a savage toll.
Cool water spears my lungs like sharpened icicles. I sink forever.
A low hum builds in my ears, Light fades to nothing.
And I sleep.
He’s comprehensively bewildered as any of us would be at such an extraordinary change in circumstance, but each day goes past, he finds himself hurtling back and forth across decades, one day in 2019, the next in 1999, living his life in out of order daily slices that suggest that whatever happened to him in 1995 sent him on a path not simply into weird timey-wimey journeying but wrecked any hopes he had of a great career, a fulfilled love life and a life that defied its broken beginnings.
While he finds all this chronological chopping and changing to be wholly disorienting at first, he soon begins to discern a pattern to the way his time-jumping occurs and he begins to wonder whether he can, in fact, doing anything to steer what seem like events completely out of his control.
But whatever insight he gains, and it’s limited guesswork at best, what is happening is way beyond the normal, his life having abandoned any and all pretense of linear sanity in favour of a jumbled mess of days that don’t make sense until you’ve lived a day that precedes them.
What does become apparent though, and in ways starkly more noticeable than those of us living a linear life that puts one consequential event logically in front of the other, is that life has changed way beyond anything he hoped and desired and that all the good things he wanted have been supplanted by a raft of terrible decisions begetting even more awful outcomes.
(courtesy official James Goodhand Twitter/X account)
But as Day Tripper kicks on, near-compelling you to turn the pages with a desperate need to find out what happens next in this standard reality-defying set of circumstances, Alex begins to realise that while he can’t control time itself, and fate is a master way beyond his influence, that he can change the decisions he makes and thus where his life goes.
It’s like a Groundhog Day-type of redemption, but with way more gravity and a spiralling realisation that asks him what he’ll do if his theories about good decisions leading to good outcomes are just a great big steaming pile of the proverbial.
Can he change things? Does have, in fact, have any agency in this remarkable and weirdly atypical life, and can he rescue that his life has become and go back to what he hoped it might be.
He begins to suspect that he does, and as Day Tripper progresses back and forth in alarmingly jumbled 24-hour chunks, he learns that what he does have a great impact, and that his life, far from being a loosey-goosey ship that sails where it will with no harm done, is heavily affected by each and every decision he makes, and life lesson he acknowledges and makes his lived own, and that he must be mindful of every little moment or he could lose everything.
Mistimed exit. Alongside each other at the door. Shoulders barged. Not deliberate, not by me, anyway.
What now? What am I supposed to do now?
Incredibly moving, thoughtful, and heartwarming in ways that will surprise you, Day Tripper is one of those books that takes an out-there idea and invests it with so much humanity and truths about life that you will gasp in recognition at accessible this extraordinary premise is.
It helps immensely that Goodhand is a superbly talented writer who milks his premise for all its worth, and as imaginative world-building goes, it’s quite marvellous, but who never loses sight of the raw, urgent humanity at the core of the story.
You will love the ideas that power the story and they are brilliantly and cleverly used, but you will feel so very much as Alex Dean battles to understand what is happening, where his agency begins and ends, and begins to take back control and remake his life into something close to what he once hoped it would be.
As novels that dance way outside the usual realm of human understanding, Day Tripper is brilliantly, gobsmackingly amazingly moving, a story that goes to some utterly out-there places but which always returns to the idea that no matter what form our lives take, that we want meaning, connection, love and possibility and that we will anything to find them and hold onto them, even if to do so, we may have to go to hell and back and discover some dark and unpalatable things about ourselves in the hope that we will be able to take them and doing something redemptively better and lifechanging.