Krishna
The title suggests that it is a science fiction book but it is not. It feels and reads like a love story and it is one. So, if you picked it up because you are a science fiction buff, you will be disappointed.
Clare is the titular wife and Henry is the time traveler. It appears that Henry travels with no control over the timing or the location or the time of the travel. He ends up at weird places, always naked on the other side.
The books goes totally confusing initially. Clare Abishire meets Henry in a library when he is twenty eight but she knows all about him and he knows nothing about her. She has seen him in all ages and knows his future (they are married after all) and yet when she saw him first, she was five. Total confusion. Yes, he was older than twenty eight when he met the five year old Clare – he is a time traveler after all but it is very confusing when told in such a jumble in the course of a conversation.
It sounds silly initially and takes some getting used to. Then you start to like the story. A lot.
He time travels to meet his own five year old self to show him around a museum. He travels to meet his future wife when she was five; he then time travels one year before that to a day that is after this meeting. Can you get more confusing? This is just a romantic story but it needlessly confuses – and with a silly explanation of how time travel is not like a serial tape being listened but is a random access thing. So far, so insipid.
And really, the story is not about the wife exclusively. It is about Henry and so the title is more than a little misleading and qualifies as ‘click bait’ (or ‘read bait’ in this case).
Old Henry teaching young Henry survival tricks gets a kick out of you and sets the tone for the rest of the book which is full of surprises. The author has taken maximum advantage of the possibilities of the time travel to create various combinations and has stayed true to Henry’s true timeline but still since the other person’s timeline can be completely out of whack, it creates a whole host of possibilities.
I will leave out the leftist political sympathies that ooze out of the story as this is irrelevant to the man tale.
As I said above, there are surprises in this book is when Henry and Clare meet each other at various times and either Clare knows more about Henry or vice versa. When Henry meets Henry, one knows more about the other including what happens in this particular visit.
There are some cute scenes where Clare (12) probes Henry (36) about who he loves.
Henry only knows what he knows in his time. So, if Henry visited Clare when he was 38 and then he visited her when he was 35, he is unaware of his previous trip (which is in his future, but she knows about it. )
With all this cute tricks, it is simply a lightweight story, the only central theme is love. And nothing major happens in the way of events.
The book gets a bit better when Henry ties a boy who hurt Clare to a tree naked and gets all the girls to witness his humiliation.
You then get to know Harry’s mother’s tragedy in an accident and how he miraculously escaped the same fate in a way police and rescue team did not understand. He was injured but was found away from the car, completely naked. You know what happened because you have ‘seen’ the same thing many times.
Good scenes where the friend of Clare’s meets Henry for the first time when Clare (in the present) takes him to meet them and then later in the night, he sees an older Henry beating up one of the people he knows.
Also when two Henrys – Is that right? Or should it be Henries? – meet and even share the same bed (to sleep, of course). Or when the friend tries to persuade Clare that Henry is not for her only to realize that she is already deeply in love.
There are cutesy scenes of Henry meeting Clare’s family (in ‘real’ time and for the first time).
There is the marriage scene where Henry who is not Henry marries Clare and then they get ‘really’ married in a civil ceremony the next day. But a series of time travelling ‘puns’ start to wear thin. The narration and the clever ‘time twists’ keep you reading.
Henry is desperate to cure his condition and finally finds a doctor (Kendricks). (Also a great scene where he gives a future prediction about the doctor himself and also manages to vanish in front of the doctor’s eyes and reappear – the last acts not voluntarily but coincidentally)
Henry is not fully ethical – he finds the winning lottery number to fund Clare’s studio and a good house.
Clare has a miscarriage – one of many and the book turns mundane – Clare mourning her mother and learning that ‘her mom loved her’.
Henry finds out several things – that he will have a daughter, and a few other things that are important to the plot. He learns that the name they choose for the kid will be Alba.
Henry also goes back in time to have sex with Clare the first time when she turns 18. Also, in real time when he is back he learns that Clare cheated on him once with Gomez.
The story moves through some more interesting scenes. I am not going to give away the plot points but I can tell you about when Henry (the time traveler) calls Henry (in real time) in desperation because he is out in the cold, and the time the entire office discovers him naked inside a cage with no clue as to how he got there. When the ‘other’ Henry comes over there, there is pandemonium.
Alba can time travel too, and a larger kid Alba comes to meet the much younger Alba. Henry is watching both in the garden when Clare comes home from her outing one day.
A very cool book. Certainly different but there are portions that can be excised out of this with not a great loss to the story-line.
Interesting and worth giving it a try.
6/10
– – Krishna (October 2019)