Rating - 3.5: worth reading, parts worth re-reading (borrow or
buy it
)
The first half is exceptional, the best thing I have read in a long while, with great writing, scenes, and structure. The second half is only good, but still emotionally compelling.
When Clare first met Henry, she was 6 and he was 36. When Henry first met Clare, he was 28 and she was 20. Henry is the titular time traveler, disappearing with no control over when he leaves or where/when he goes. Clare is the titular wife, who was waiting her whole life to meet someone who did not know she was coming. Once they are married, she never knows when he is going.
This is absolutely worthwhile. The first half is a great love story that rediscovers the classic notion of a love that is destined to be, in a way that makes it palatable and reasonable to a jaded modern audience. The second half is a continuous aversion of "happily ever after."
The story structure is disorienting for the characters but mostly linear for the reader. The time-traveler jumps around in time, but most of the events flow in objective chronological order, and the exceptions are usually digressions in which we follow the time-traveler one step into his subjective chronological order. Everything is easy to follow, particularly since we start the first half at its mid-point before heading back to the beginning. After a brief introduction, we see Henry meeting Clare for the first time, then we drop back fourteen years to when Clare first met Henry and work our way forward to her becoming the time-traveler's wife. His future lies behind her, insert your own paradoxical phrasing here.
The structure could have been deliberately unclear and disorienting, but it was not. Some of you may consider that a wasted opportunity, given time travel, but it reduces the load on the reader and gives a good return for your time and effort. You get more back than you put into it.
I am struck by this as a modern take on a past that seems alien to us. If you read old stories about how event x is inevitable, they talk about destiny, duty, social or metaphysical forces that we don't really believe in anymore except as something authors cite to make characters act when they have no reasonable motivation. We have a different device here, characters who know what they will do/choose because they have seen that it has happened.
And it works, it is completely compelling and conveys what the old sense of destiny has lost.
Combining that with the story structure, you have an idea of what is going on, what is going to happen, and what has happened, but not so much that there is no point in going on to see it for yourself. You get some explicit foreshadowing, almost all of which flows naturally in the story.
The title is indicative of the characters' roles and relations, more strongly in the first half. This is officially her story, as the title character, but her place is tied to his, possessed. We will follow her as she relates to him. He is the spectacle you came to see, but we will follow him as he relates to her. He appears to her, and we mostly hear about his other travels in vague reference, the same way we hear about the rest of her life. Some other scenes are illustrated, including some that are pure characterization that does not directly build on their relationship, but we mostly see them when they see each other. If they are not both on camera, one is probably head towards or away from the other. After the wedding, that becomes somewhat less prominent, but there is always a sense of motion towards and away from each other.
The characters explicitly reflect on this. Their lives are tied together, and there they are, waiting to see one another across time. Free will is a recurring theme, with the question of how much they can choose when they already know what they will have chosen. They both learn of their marriage before either has a say in it. The sense of destiny is wonderful, comforting, familiar, and constricting.
As we reach the second half, destiny becomes a recurring horror. Access to the future has its benefits, but bad times are coming, repeatedly, continuously, and there is nothing to gained by the knowledge thereof. Henry appears in or leaves from a painful situation, and it cannot be stopped because it has already happened somewhere in the timeline. This is perhaps the only excuse for his finding out when he dies and then not bringing it into the story at all for fifty pages; why bring everyone down?
In a similar problematic note, the second half also spends fifty pages on miscarriage. That is a lot of the book and a lot of miscarriages. It becomes numbing over time, as the characters get hit the same way repeatedly. It feels less like something that happens to them and more like something the author does to them.
Some of Henry's suffering has a similar feel as problems stack up. If he worries about something in the first three-quarters of the book, it will probably happen to him in the last quarter. The obvious foreshadowing comes in the page of random worries about the cage and how he would not be able to get out if he appeared in there. Guess.
The first half has its traumas, and they stand out better in a love story. The second half is trauma, with happy moments that do not stand out as well. There is no moment so good that it cannot be spoiled by being sandwiched between two awful problems, the best of which are when Henry is about to go back in time to cause or experience the problem we just had. Every trip to past happiness is a chance for present suffering (he's gone) or to introduce new problems upon his return. Clare's eighteenth birthday is mentioned in the first half, but saved until the second half ... where it can be matched with another revelation to make things even harder.
You do have fair warning about all this. Henry and Clare both mention in the early years that older Henry and Clare are going through rough times. The problem becomes that there is no light at the end of the tunnel, despite tossing a brief flicker into the last pages.
I seem to be writing much that is negative. This is because the second half suffers by comparison, and it is what you read last. After a wonderful and uplifting early story, you may walk away with a feeling of the inevitability of suffering and loss. Let us end with the beginning.
We begin knowing that things will end well. We have the title, and we have Henry from the future telling young Clare about what is to come, so we know the marriage will happen and we have Henry's belief that this is something to look forward to. It is just a matter of getting there, through whatever problems might arise from life and involuntary time travel. You can probably guess some of the hijinx right now.
The episodes of childhood trauma stand out because it is mostly happy. We see them together, and these are good times for both of them. (Henry seems to have had a less happy childhood than Clare, but we do not see young Henry that often.) Clare grows up as well adjusted as you can when your future husband occasionally appears naked in the meadow.
Their courtship is probably the best of the book. Once Clare and Henry meet in realtime, everything starts coming together. They have moments that Henry alluded to in previous (future) years and the discovery of what they do that has not been scripted for them. It is everything that Clare was looking forward to and everything that Henry never realized he always needed. As we get closer to the mid-point of the book, we are seeing the project come to completion. Clare has been waiting not just for this Henry but for the man he becomes, and we see Henry grow into that.
It is an excellent mix of discovery and the familiar. Some things are known, and they are wonderful. Some things are yet to be written, and they are wonderful too.
My disappointment in the second half was driven by expectations created in the first half. Yes, there is the quality of writing, pacing, and structure, but also the plot themes. They spend the first half on the path to a known future. What happens once they get there? Future Henry did not mention much of that, so they have few boundaries or expectations. How does that feel to move from predestination to freedom? What do you expect to happen once Henry passes the oldest age at which he visited young Clare? Rather than transitioning to scary but exhilarating newness, the book finds stronger, darker bonds for the characters and story.
If that is your thing, great, here you have a very thorough example. If you are a sap like me, it starts to read like kicking them while they are down. The occasional lift is just a chance to toss them down again, while the sad moments in the first half accent how happy so much of it is. Let us conclude with two random notes.
Early on, I was consciously aware of reading a male character written by a female author. There is something about his voice that suggests female projection rather than male introspection. Not that there are no men who would think quite that way, but there it is; either it fades over time, or I just got used to Henry's perspective. A minor character has a similar reaction late in the book.
Second, how about that author avatar? Clare is a red-headed, Catholic visual artist from Port Huron, Michigan, who moves to Chicago and frequents a particular library. Audrey Niffenegger is ... yeah. Odds on whether the author frequents Clare's favorite sushi place? I would guess that Henry inherited her music tastes, or were they adapted from her husband? Just idle speculation there, but Stephenie Meyer has nothing on this lass.
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