Time and Again by Jack Finney
My rating: 3 of 5 stars A Stereoscopic Time Travel Manhattan Romance On a November Friday in 1970 just before lunch, twenty-eight-year-old commercial artist Simon Morley is sketching a bar of soap from various angles to find the best way to depict it while counting the hours till the weekend, the days till his vacation, and the years till his retirement, when he receives a visitor who changes his life: U.S. Army Major Ruben Prien. He wants to recruit Si for a secret government project, “the damnedest experience a human being has ever had,” way bigger than the space program: time travel. Why Si? He has the perfect mix of physical, psychological, and temperamental qualities required for the project’s time travelers, being able “to see things as they are and at the same time as they might have been” with “the eye of an artist.” It also helps that Si’s unmarried (though he has a great girlfriend, Katherine Mancuso), and especially that old photographs make him feel a “sense of wonder, staring at the strange clothes and vanished backgrounds, at knowing that what you’re seeing was once real” and that “You could have walked into the scene then, touched those people, and spoken to them. You could actually have gone into that strange outmoded old building and seen what now you never can—what was just inside the door.” Finally, Si is just a uniquely sensitive guy. As a young lady of 1882 tells him, “You’re the most understanding man I've ever known.” (Are we indulging in the creative artistic type’s fantasy of being appealing to women?) Time travel in Jack Finney's Time and Again (1970) is perceptual rather than technological. No fancy time machines! You just listen to a spiel on Einstein’s ideas on time, research the target time and place, prepare yourself to fit into them, unplug your TV and read a vintage novel, cut as many of the myriad “invisible threads” tying you to the present as you can, engage in a little self-hypnosis, and then… step out of the present and back into the past of, say, 1850 Montana or 1432 Paris. In Si’s case, he trains to walk out the door of the well-preserved Dakota apartment building of 1970 NYC into the Central Park of 1882 NYC. Why January 1882 NYC? Kate’s adoptive father’s father killed himself while leaving behind a cryptic and partially burned letter postmarked then and referring to the destruction by fire of the world, after which his wife buried him under a tombstone featuring the symbol of a nine-pointed star inside a circle comprised of tiny dots but no name, and Si wants to solve that mystery. To investigate it, Si rents a room in the same Grammercy Park boarding house where Jake Pickering, the man who sent the letter, lives. To avoid changing the present in some unforeseen way, Si is supposed to observe without intervening, but will that be possible in a boarding house with several boarders and two landladies, one of whom is a beautiful young woman named Julia Charbonneau?! Without departing from his role as non-interfering observer, how can Si prevent Julia from disastrously marrying the older macho domineering Jake, who sure doesn’t appreciate Si hanging around Julia and drawing her portrait?! Rather than using scientific and technological details to convince us that time travel is possible, then, Finney uses minute observational and sensual details as to what New York City in 1882 January looks like, sounds like, smells like, and feels like. Thus, the story is a paean to NYC (especially Manhattan), as Si relates its different and similar wonders and horrors in both 1970 and 1882. Indeed, the novel is stereoscopic, with vivid descriptions of contemporary and old NYC combining to give a three-dimensional picture of the city, similar in effect to that Si says occurs when gazing at stereoscopic photographs: “the almost, but not quite, identical pair of photographs mounted side by side on stiff cardboard, that, looked at through the viewer, give a miraculous effect of depth.... Because the good ones, the really clear sharp photographs, are so real.” Finney’s novel prefigures something like Connie Willis’ Doomsday Book (1992) more than recalls HG Wells’ The Time Machine. Depending on your tastes, the novel may take too long to get Si time traveling. Finney’s meticulous attention to detail (faces and clothes, facades and interiors, offices and saloons, streets and parks, and so on) at times becomes too much of a good thing. And the prolonged climax featuring a harrowing fire scene and an excessive chase scene could be shortened without harming the impact of the novel. Also, Finney may fudge the differences between English spoken in 1882 and in 1970. When Si gets excited, he sounds too much like a man of 1970 (e.g., “We need money, damn it”). Some of that is intentional, for humor, as when he forgets himself and asks Julia, “Suppose we telephoned your aunt.” But after drawing attention to how melodramatically and ornately people in 1882 talk and write, Finney writes conversations between its people and Si that don’t sound much different than any we might expect to hear in 1970. At the same time, the novel is dated to 1970 in some of its language, for example, Si referring to young women as “girls” and to African Americans as “negroes.” The novel’s political heart is in the right place. It is a Vietnam War era book. Despite Si rarely mentioning that war (he references the atomic bombing of Japan more often), his anti-authoritarian ethical/moral center derives from his disillusionment at learning that the people at the top making the decisions for the country are no better informed or well-intentioned or more intelligent than anyone else and have no idea of the ramifications of their decisions. The novel takes an interesting turn when the military starts wanting to nudge the time travel project into more active interference in the past so as to benefit the USA in the present. It also features some pointed lines like this one about police: “Why, why do cops habitually and meaninglessly act nastily as if it were a kind of instinct?” And some moments really give a time traveling frisson, as when Si observes a belled sleigh gliding through central park or finds himself at a busy intersection in which all the trams, buses, taxis, etc. are horse-drawn or sees the arm of the statue of liberty holding the torch in Madison Park or stands outside the house of Herman Melville or plays games with the people of the boarding house or sketches Trinity Church (whose steeple was the tallest point in NYC), etc. Fans of thoughtful time travel fiction should like the novel. Audiobook reader Paul Hecht is fine; nothing fancy; straightforward and competent; easy to listen to. View all my reviews
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