Lee Allen's Blog - Posts Tagged "audrey-niffenegger"

The Time Traveler's Wife by Audrey Niffenegger

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


A searing, captivating time travel romance.

As a child, Clare Abshire meets the man who will be her future husband.

Yet, it will be many years before Henry DeTamble meets Clare, while she commits to spending a lifetime waiting for this moment to arrive.

For Clare’s husband is a traveller in time, their romance a complex web of interconnected past and future moments, the present all too temporary and fleeting.

‘The Time Traveler’s Wife’ is the debut novel by Audrey Niffenegger, a science-fiction romance that takes us back and forth through time to reveal the complex tapestry of Clare and Henry’s entwined lives, told from the dual perspectives of both characters at different points of their lives. Intricately woven and beautifully written, its non-linear narrative is both captivating and thrilling, the romance immersive and emotional, beautiful and tragic. Henry meets Clare for the first time at his place of work, twenty-eight and twenty years old respectively, having no idea who she is, despite her having known him since she was six, when she meets him for the first time at thirty-six in what will become their special place for many years to come. We also meet Henry at five years old, who meets his future self at twenty-four the first time he time travels, going on to be his own mentor to survive in his uniquely dangerous situation.

Niffenegger weaves a deeply moving and thought-provoking tale, an exhilarating dance through time, a journey through destiny, the tale of two people’s entwined lives, delving deep into the emotional impact of such a relationship on the two central characters, excavating the depth of their emotion and their shared memories - how thrilling and incredible, but also how difficult and heartbreaking. Henry has no control over his travelling, neither when it happens nor when and where he will turn up. Nevertheless, his travelling is often concentric to significant events and people – he continues to revisit his mother’s death, his own childhood, times throughout Clare’s life and the life they share together. He often struggles to keep track of his own timeline, many aspects of his life only becoming clear as he goes on to experience them in real time. All the while, his condition ages him, the danger it presents threatening to one day be impossible to outrun.

I adored this book. For me, the concept of time travel proves to be one of the most romantic (second only to twin flames and soul mates) – this notion that two people are destined to be together, their entire lives entwined to the point where cause and effect blur and their love endures for as long as they live, entirely timeless and unbound by the limitations of a linear lifespan. Throughout, we explore many philosophical questions through the lens of a beautiful love story – touching on themes of free will and consent, fate and determinism, faith and spirituality, physics, evolution and genetics; all wrapped in a deeply human narrative of two people finding each other in the most bizarre of circumstances, never giving up on each other, despite all the challenges - their futile wish for life to simply be normal, their desire to have a child, their hope that a cure can be found for Henry’s condition, the dreams they share for a future that may just be unattainable.

The inevitability of what is to come becomes apparent very early on – what begins must end, and in the case of time travel, it is something perhaps evermore both present and distant – and when we finally see just how it will end, it is heartbreaking. On this tapestry of the impossible, as with all the best works of fiction, we experience something that remains very true to our own lives. We will all, one way or another, lose the people we love. It is inevitable, yet we live every day ignoring it. Yet loss and separation can teach us to truly cherish the time we do have, the moments we share that become precious memory, and that, most of all, the most important of those moments is the one we are in now. Also, perhaps, something else, that no one is ever as truly lost to us as we might believe.

The novel has been adapted for the screen twice – first as a film version in 2009, adapted by Bruce Joel Rubin (writer of ‘Ghost’) and directed by Robert Schwentke; and as a TV series in 2018, written by Steven Moffat (whose work includes ‘Doctor Who’, ‘Sherlock’ and ‘Dracula’ (2020)). Niffenegger has also been working on a sequel, with the working title ‘The Other Husband’, with publication anticipated imminently, the novel having been expected to be completed by 2023.

A truly masterful novel, ‘The Time Traveler’s Wife’ is a timeless tale of love and woe that can be told again and again.



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