(courtesy Macmillan Publishers)
One of the marks of an exceptionally good writer is the ability to take a story steeped in a fantastical premise, one ripe with all kinds of imaginative possibility and to do something impactfully meaningful with it.
It’s a real art; lean too hard into the fantastical, and how can you not sometimes when the idea is truly gobsmackingly good, and any of the story’s inherent humanity is swallowed up by dazzling blockbuster premise but embrace the humanity too hard and you end up with narrative which is all meaningful emotion but which is shorn of the breathtaking ideas which first gave it life.
The brilliant part, among many brilliant parts of Joseph Eckert’s The Traveler, is that he vaults off the central idea of a man suddenly and inexplicably leaping involuntarily through with no way to stop it and turns it into one of the most heartrendingly good stories of a father and son that you will ever read.
While you can’t help but wonder what is happening to Scott Treder, a run-of-the-mill suburban working dad who is driving on his usual commute one morning at 7:52 am when he finds himself tumbling messily and bloodily along the bitumen, his car vanished from around him, you are consumed by the damage this bizarrely unexpected event and the many that follow do to Scott, his life and his relationship with many people but primarily his prodigiously intelligent, sensitive son Lyle.
I sat back and put my hands behind my head. I stared at the off-white spackled ceiling. I was forgetting something. My Honda. It had crashed into a parked car without me at the wheel. Twenty-four hours later, I fell out of the air.
I took a deep breath, let it out in a long rush, and closed the unhelpful billion-plus entries on ‘missing time’.
Every morning, with no way to stop and with the greatest minds including his own son, unable to explain why it’s happening, Scott jumps ahead in time in ever-doubling intervals; first one day, then two, then four until he finds himself racing through time in first decades, then centuries then millennia and so on.
While you might think it an exciting adventure, and in some ways stripped of its emotional and psychic impact it is, it profoundly impacts Scott for the worse with the everyday man who loves his wife Amy and son Lyle and simply wants to keep doing it for as long as he lives, losing everything he values.
What is huge swathes of time for everyone else is a matter of days for him, and as the The Traveler races ahead but not without giving the huge existential impact on its central character time time to ruminate and breathe, Scott has to grapple with the fact that his young seven-year-old son is suddenly a young man, then a middle-aged star of the world of physics then an old man in a future riven by war and then … nothing?
Ah that is where this hugely epic but emotionally, painfully intimate story truly excels.
Eckert finds a way to keep father and son together through days then thousands and millions of years, and while the how is the stuff of spoilers that must not and cannot be divulged, what it means is that these two inextricably linked souls, a father who simply wants to but cannot protect his son, and a son desperate to help and love his dad, are forever part of the same amazing story.
Lyle dedicates his whole life, and a life beyond, to saving his dad because as he explains to Scott at one point, how can he not?
While Scott begs him time and again not to surrender all his life to what appears to be a hopeless cause, Lyle loves his dad too much to simply sit back and let whatever the hell is going on and honestly the payoff at the end absolutely justifies the intricately plotted and superbly executed story at its heart, take its course.
The Traveler is, for all its trappings of time travel and futures both dark and light, promising and direly dystopian (because humanity will be humanity and keep ruining a good thing), a story of a father and son who cannot be apart, who love and need each other and who are, for better or worse, bound together on the most unique and fantastical journey anyone has ever been on.
Eckert’s great gift in telling this wholly engrossing, all-embracing and deeply affecting story is that he never forgets the humanity at the heart of it; much like other time travel stories, but wholly original in its telling too, like Back to the Future and H. G. Wells’ Time Machine, he matches every jaw-droppingly imaginative beat of the narrative with so much heart and soul, so many moments of agonisingly loving father-son interaction, that you are both amazed and ripped to shreds, often in the one paragraph.
‘I’ll help you as best I can,’ Lyle said.
‘Lyle.’
‘Yes?’
‘I’m glad you’re here. With me.’
‘So am I, Dad,’ Lyle whispered. ‘So am I’.
I started walking.
Full of hope, which may or may not be fulfilled, The Traveler is a long journey into a dark and troubling future where Scott is taken without any say or, at first at least, any real preparedness or ability to cope.
While he is eventually armed, literally and metaphorically for his extraordinary travels, he never really makes his peace with what he loses and supposedly gains, and much of the story, despite the kindnesses he is shown by people who come to revere him as variously a test case of history or a god or a prophet or simply an unique man doing what no one else has done (and never wants to do because how great is the cost?), is about his desperate attempts to make some tentative accommodation with a life trajectory that he never wanted, and bitterly resents and only ever really partially makes a peace with.
Whatever his angst, what really cements The Traveler as something truly moving and utterly special is that while Scott is buffeted by a mechanism he can’t control, the strengths of his existence played by a force people can only guess at, and he journeys through future worlds of stupendous breadth and imagination and apocalyptical hellishness, he is a father to a son, part of a chain that somehow stays miraculously unbroken and takes them to places and times and moments of the heart which tear you apart, heal you up, seize your imagination and eventually remind how precious life and connection and the great wonders that sit at the heart of so many transcendentally ordinary things.