Charlie Fenton’s Reviews > The House on the Strand > Status Update

‘This would be the ultimate meaning of the experiment, surely, that by moving about in time death was destroyed. This wad what Magnus so far had not understood. To him, the drug released the complex brew within the brain that served up the savoured past. To me, it proved that the past was living still, that we were all participants, all witnesses.’

‘I clumped back to the beach, hot and curiously tired. It was odd, but it seemed more of an effort to face the family now, without having swallowed the drug and moved in the other world, than it would had I actually taken a trip in time. I felt thwarted, drained of energy, and filled with a strange sense of apprehension. Imagination was not enough; I craved the living experience which had been denied me’

‘I wondered what had happened after that meeting at Polpey’s farm when Isolda risked so much to warn her lover; whether Bodrugan, brooding on what might-have-been, returned to his estates and thought about his love, and whether she, when her husband Oliver was absent, met him perhaps in secret. I had been standing beside them both less than twenty-four hours ago. Six centuries ago...’

‘It is the fate of every man, I suppose, at some time or other to glimpse a face in a crowd and not forget it, or perhaps, by a stroke of luck, to catch up with the owner at a later date, in a restaurant, at a party. To meet often breaks the spell and leads to disenchantment. This was not possible now. I looked across the centuries at what Shakespeare called ‘a lass unparalleled’, who, alas, would never look at me.’