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Feb. 2nd, 2007 01:18 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
eye_of_a_catAudrey Niffenegger, The Time Traveller's Wife
As recommended by my mother, my housemate, my boss, five of my colleagues, about eighty-nine of my friends, and a boy who kept trying to hit on me in the library last semester. The entire world has read this book. And what the entire world wants to know, the minute you get to the end, is whether or not it made you cry. And they all love it so, so much, and every single one of them was in tears by the end (my boss! my boss cried real tears, just like a human!), and now I'm scared to say anything about it in case my lack of effusive emotional response comes across badly and they turn mean.
Right. So. Bravery. Yes.
It's a non-linear narrative about a non-linear love story. As such, it's got two large, heavy, splinter-laden hurdles to cross from the start. Two people being in love is, by its very nature, a difficult thing to write about in an interesting way - not because it doesn't matter, but because it matters to them. Introduce the puppet-strings of social commentary, and it matters to other people, too, because now it's about more than those two people. Introduce a crisis, a series of misunderstandings, a rival, a tragedy, a soul-shattering breakup, and it'll matter to everyone reading, because even if they don't know the people involved they want to know how the story's going to get from point A to point B when it's veered off to points J, Q, and R along the way. But a story that's just about the two people involved, and a story which starts at point B and ends at point B because the future's already past, well... that story's got its work cut out.
None of which is to say that Clare and Henry's story is without problems. The book's at pains to state that we're not talking face-changing aliens from Gallifrey here: ability/curse aside, Henry's a normal, unremarkable person, and his relationship with Clare goes through the same kind of difficulties and development that anyone else's would. While I'll admit to not caring too much about all of these (learning to live together as a young couple is a character-building experience in oh so many ways, and God knows we can all relate to the sort of financial skittishness it can bring about, but forgive me for not identifying all that strongly with someone else's when it includes sentences beginning with "We get by okay on Henry's salary and the interest from my trust fund, but..."), some of them are truly heartbreaking, the kind of emotional pain it seems disrespectful to describe as well-written.
The things I didn't like were fairly minor. Henry's tendency to skip about in time didn't really need a pseudo-scientific explanation, and the attempt to design one around it just rang false; if a mistake in the genetic sequence that codes for the time-determining part of your brain can lead you to time-travel, then shouldn't a mistake in the genetic sequence that codes for the balance-determining part of your brain allow you to levitate? Also, librarians don't spend their time shelving books, especially librarians in libraries of that size, since they have a) more important things to do and b) minions to shelve books for them. (Take it from one of the minions.)
Other than that, and other than the slightly disturbing idea of Clare never knowing a life without Henry while Henry had a past without Clare (and didn't we all know the girl at school who didn't kiss boys at parties because her twenty-something boyfriend was waiting in the car?), it works. It does. You care about these people, and however inevitable the ending, I can personally testify that it's still moving even when you're reading the book at 11.30pm in a very cold train station waiting for your continually delayed train to show up, a time during which few of us have much love for humanity (on the subject of which: screw you, ScotRail, and for the love of God drop this two-more-minutes waffling, admit that the train's at least half an hour away, and let us get a coffee).
It didn't make me cry, though. No book in the history of the world, up to and including Watership Down, has ever made me cry.
It's nothing personal. I promise.
Please don't hurt me.
As recommended by my mother, my housemate, my boss, five of my colleagues, about eighty-nine of my friends, and a boy who kept trying to hit on me in the library last semester. The entire world has read this book. And what the entire world wants to know, the minute you get to the end, is whether or not it made you cry. And they all love it so, so much, and every single one of them was in tears by the end (my boss! my boss cried real tears, just like a human!), and now I'm scared to say anything about it in case my lack of effusive emotional response comes across badly and they turn mean.
Right. So. Bravery. Yes.
It's a non-linear narrative about a non-linear love story. As such, it's got two large, heavy, splinter-laden hurdles to cross from the start. Two people being in love is, by its very nature, a difficult thing to write about in an interesting way - not because it doesn't matter, but because it matters to them. Introduce the puppet-strings of social commentary, and it matters to other people, too, because now it's about more than those two people. Introduce a crisis, a series of misunderstandings, a rival, a tragedy, a soul-shattering breakup, and it'll matter to everyone reading, because even if they don't know the people involved they want to know how the story's going to get from point A to point B when it's veered off to points J, Q, and R along the way. But a story that's just about the two people involved, and a story which starts at point B and ends at point B because the future's already past, well... that story's got its work cut out.
None of which is to say that Clare and Henry's story is without problems. The book's at pains to state that we're not talking face-changing aliens from Gallifrey here: ability/curse aside, Henry's a normal, unremarkable person, and his relationship with Clare goes through the same kind of difficulties and development that anyone else's would. While I'll admit to not caring too much about all of these (learning to live together as a young couple is a character-building experience in oh so many ways, and God knows we can all relate to the sort of financial skittishness it can bring about, but forgive me for not identifying all that strongly with someone else's when it includes sentences beginning with "We get by okay on Henry's salary and the interest from my trust fund, but..."), some of them are truly heartbreaking, the kind of emotional pain it seems disrespectful to describe as well-written.
The things I didn't like were fairly minor. Henry's tendency to skip about in time didn't really need a pseudo-scientific explanation, and the attempt to design one around it just rang false; if a mistake in the genetic sequence that codes for the time-determining part of your brain can lead you to time-travel, then shouldn't a mistake in the genetic sequence that codes for the balance-determining part of your brain allow you to levitate? Also, librarians don't spend their time shelving books, especially librarians in libraries of that size, since they have a) more important things to do and b) minions to shelve books for them. (Take it from one of the minions.)
Other than that, and other than the slightly disturbing idea of Clare never knowing a life without Henry while Henry had a past without Clare (and didn't we all know the girl at school who didn't kiss boys at parties because her twenty-something boyfriend was waiting in the car?), it works. It does. You care about these people, and however inevitable the ending, I can personally testify that it's still moving even when you're reading the book at 11.30pm in a very cold train station waiting for your continually delayed train to show up, a time during which few of us have much love for humanity (on the subject of which: screw you, ScotRail, and for the love of God drop this two-more-minutes waffling, admit that the train's at least half an hour away, and let us get a coffee).
It didn't make me cry, though. No book in the history of the world, up to and including Watership Down, has ever made me cry.
It's nothing personal. I promise.
Please don't hurt me.
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Date: 2007-02-06 10:48 am (UTC)