(courtesy Macmillan Publishers)
When you’re in love, big all-consuming, the world begins and ends with the person before you, the whole experience feels big and epic and expansive as the vast sweep of space.
Love is one of those things which defies expectations, stares down limitations and busts all the pesky restraints of real life into small inconsequential, life-enlivening pieces.
But can it better time?
That’s one of the central percolating issues in the exquisitely beautiful and wildly imaginative novella, Time Was by Ian McDonald, which tells the engrossing and compelling story of two lovers separated by time and war whose sole anchor to the world of those landlocked in bog standard chronology, is books.
Tom and Ben meet and fall hard for each other in the catastrophic hell of World War Two, one a soldier, the other a scientist working on a top secret project that aims to hide British targets from the Germans, and while circumstances, military, geopolitical and societal don’t favour this kind of union, they are consumed by each other in a way that speaks to the power of love to overcome pretty much anything.
Or at least make it not feel quite so shitty.
But a grand experiment on a remote piece of British coastline goes awry, the two disappear, presumed dead by those cleaning up the aftermath, their bodies unable to be found on a beach flanked by a sea that appeared to be on luminous glowing fire.
Until he dropped his band and I was not quick enough to look away–deliberately so–and his eye caught mine. We knew. We communicated through the airwaves.
It appears their story is over, tragic in many ways but perhaps simply because so many people were unaware of it, and if they were, turned a blind eye to it.
But Time Was is a story about defying the odds and embracing the seeming impossibilities of life, and rather than being extinguished from existence, Ben and Tom are lost in the folds of time, desperately trying to find each other across decades.
Their only link? Notes left in books of poetry, especially one by someone called E. L. Anonymous, one of which is discovered by a rare book dealer in present day England who uncovers a mystery for the ages, and it is literally for the ages, one begging to be solved, and which takes him on an extraordinary journey which frankly one novella shouldn’t be able to contain.
But contain it, it does because McDonald is one of those gifted writers able to pack a metric of emotion, thoughtfulness and humanity into 142 perfectly wrought pages and make it all feel as it belongs organically and movingly together.
There’s never a point in this extraordinary piece of work where you feel as if too much is being attempted and that the tale of two time-crossed lovers spanning countless years cannot possibly elegantly occupy the word count assigned to it.
Each word belongs as if pre-ordained to the story which moves between chapters or sections devoted to Ben and Tom together, their love quietly but powerfully evident, and the present day where the mystery of their quest to find each other is revealed little by little yet with the kind of impact that will you gasping at times.
(courtesy Macmillan Publishers)
To say anything more than that would be to reveal spoilers that are integral to the way this nuanced book unfurls.
Suffice to say that while what takes place in Time Was is extraordinary that it is told with an affecting humanity and real empathy that brings the story alive in ways which don’t grab your attention blockbuster-like but have real impact even so.
It takes some talent to pour a powerful story like, full of mystery and love, tragedy and hope, into such small form, but McDonald is up to it, flawlessly placing piece after piece before us, and making an outrageously out-there premise feel like the most natural thing in the world.
Balancing everyday humanity with feverish missions across space and time, Time Was feels like one of the grandest love stories ever told, right up there with the queer love story that is the standout episode, for this reviewer at least, of Torchwood (“Captain Jack Harkness”, S1 E12).
In this episode, which steals your heart if it is open to the endlessly queer possibilities of love which knows no boundaries or constraints, Captain Jack goes to a building in present day Cardiff, once a grand ballroom during wartime, where, thanks to the magical realism if the series, is able to transport him back to the 1940s where he falls, in ways too beautiful to fully do justice to, with a soldier home from the front.
‘The lift the mask and see what’s underneath, but what’s underneath, Emmett, is another mask. The truth is under that mask. The truth is out there, like the show says.’
‘How would I see that truth?’
‘What do you want to see it for, friend?’
There’s an elegance and beauty to that episode, and while Time Was bears no actual narrative similarity to it, it does embody the same sense of the wonders and sadness of true love.
It also speaks to how big love can be.
We all speak about the expansiveness magic and transportive ability of love in the kind of hushed tones reserved for the most majestic and wondrous of things, but for so much of the time, it simply feels like a concept, an appealing idea that doesn’t really find the form we expect it to (well, until we fall in love and then all bets are off).
But in Time Was, love and all its poetry and thrill and angst comes astonishingly, mysteriously and stunningly alive in a story that builds and builds to the point where a footnote of history suddenly feels like the biggest story you have ever come across.
For a small book, Time Was packs a big punch.
It will leave you consumed happily by the beauty of love, beguiled by a mystery that does get solved and in incredibly compelling ways and saddened and comforted all at once by how love can bring us together, tear us apart and yet still feel like the greatest thing on earth even when it doesn’t play out as you expect.
Time Was is a joyously alive and clever book, full of emotion, humanity, hope and despair, all of it told with an elegance that will have you gasping at how clever one writer can be and how they can fit so much of what it means to be alive in such a small package, on which will have a large and everlasting impact on you if you let it.