Time is one of those concepts we like to think we have a handle on.
We know we can’t stop its progress, it goes by too fast (usually; although it can also go by far too slowly when we’re at the coalface of work or on a particularly boring weekend), there is far too little of it or not enough, and there are sayings, cliches and glib tropes aplenty to explain it, describe it, lament or encourage it.
But just like time itself, a complex subject that has consumed the minds, to varying degrees of success, of the likes of Kubler, Newton, and of course, Einstein himself to name but a few, our attempts to subjugate it with word and deed always amount to a fairly inconsequential drop in the ocean.
In John Wray’s The Lost Time Accidents, a sprawling, imaginative book that explores the lives of one family, the Toulas/Tollivers, utterly enthralled to time’s myriad, often inexplicable facets, it becomes patently obvious how damn near impossible it is to even begin to understand how time ultimately works, let alone control it in any kind of way, let alone a meaningful one.
That doesn’t mean, of course, that the Toulas/Tollivers don’t try.
“It would prove to be a magical year for my great-uncle as well, but the magic in his case was black as pitch. His father had met his end in the form of a watch salesman’s Daimler, a death that was not without a certain gentle irony; Waldemar’s nemesis, by contrast, was neither a man nor a machine, but an idea. That idea’s name was special relativity, Mrs. Haven, and there was nothing gentle about it whatsoever. As obscure as it was–and as innocuous as its author appeared–it had the power to annihilate the world.” (P. 63)
Unfortunately, beginning with Ottokar in late nineteenth-century Moravia (now Czech Republic), who supposedly happens on a way to travel through time, thus controlling it to some degree, and ending up with his great-grandson Waldemar in twenty-first century New York City, the family ends up more cursed than blessed by their endeavours.
In fact, you could well argue that their attempts to uncover, explore and master Ottokar’s theorem, much of which was lost in a tragic accident that claimed his life, send them all mad, consumed by a notion that time can be controlled and corralled, when all evidence points to quite the opposite.
Even by the book’s deliciously obtuse ending (or is it the beginning?), you are not really sure whether the family has succeeded in mastering time, fallen victim to a crackpot, witchdoctor-y delusion or simply lost their minds, their century-long mania less triumphant than a dour, all-consuming descent into failure and oblivion.
Suffice to say, with his gloriously dense yet richly-accessible prose, Wray masterfully succeeds in crafting an engrossing, astonishingly original tale that ultimately is less about time (although it is clearly the main protagonist) than the way families become an all-consuming passion for their members, whether they wish to participate or not.
We might think we are striking out on our own, untrammeled by family history and untainted by its losses and gains, but we are all, one way or another, the product of everyone who has come before, and escape, though often attempted, from the weighty expectations of our familial past, is rarely successful.
The Lost Time Accidents is a book that manages to be intense and yet wryly accessible all at once.
While there is a great deal of portentous weight to much of its narrative, culminating in young Waldemar, named by his eccentric, drunk-the-family-Kool-Aid-till-the-jug-is-dry aunts, mourning a love affair with a married woman he can never have for a whole host of reasons, being trapped in a bubble, removed from the flow of time, there is also a great deal of accessible, emotional resonance throughout the book.
Not quite as much as you would think given the weight of family history pressing down on each of its members but enough for you to begin to understand what it’s like for Waldemar, named after a Nazi war criminal uncle by his twisted aunts, to grapple with a life not entirely his own.
In fact, Waldermar, like his father and his father before him, has been trapped for decades in a time trap of their own making; granted it doesn’t manifest as a the chronology-free bubble that the youngest Tolliver now inhabits, until well down the family line, but it has been there, in thought and obsession ever since Ottokar stepped off a street in pre-twentieth century Znojmo, Moravia.
That is finally ensares Waldemar in its clutches is almost fated, fated as he is with closing the family loop; what isn’t so certain is now that happens.
“More and more clearly, as he whittled and buffed, Orson came to see his novel as a paean to Reason. How he’d managed to be born into a family that approached science the way a witch doctor approaches medicine he had no idea, but he was resolved, more than ever, to go his own way.” (P. 312)
Have Ottokar’s insights into time finally proven themselves? Was the monstrously evil work of Waldemar, whose nightmarish experiments resulted in the deaths of thousands at Aschenwald camp, onto something real? Or was he, like his Children of the Corn-nieces Enzian and Gentian, fooled by a grand generations-long joke on their forebear’s part?
Honestly by the end of this ambitiously immersive book, you’re not really sure.
It’s possibly young Waldemar has gone completely mad, killing himself rather than continuing a family line of which he is a part very much against his will. Or maybe, and this is where The Lost Time Accidents is both zanily quirky and unnervingly, desperately emotionally, darkly mad, the family has succeeded in having their way with time, although at great personal and familial cost.
In the end, how you interpret the ending is not the point.
Far more important, and elucidated in ways poetic and sublime, weirdly mental and gloriously sane, but never less than enthralling, is the way a family’s obsession, its curse if you like, can shape and twist the lives of everyone in it, decades and generations down the track, and how despite our best efforts, we can be complicit in its tyrannical dynamics.
The Lost Time Accidents is a book that is both deeply emotionally-relatable while yet being chillingly removed, a clever undertaking that comes close to sinking under its own ambitious weight, but which ultimately is a tale of family and time, and how we are always captive to the past as we race through the present into the future, and quite possibly, if you believe the madness or otherwise of the family Toula/Tolliver, looping back onto ourselves for a familial eternity.
