The narrator is 400 years old, but the sardonic asides give this pacy novel a modern twist
“You see, I have a condition,” Tom Hazard, the narrator of this engaging novel, confesses on page one. He is quasi-immortal. “I am old – old in the way that a tree, or a quahog clam, or a Renaissance painting is old. I was born well over four hundred years ago, on the third of March 1581 …” For every 13 or 14 human years, he ages one year. But far from bringing him godlike pleasure, his condition places him at a mournful distance from the rest of humanity, doomed to see everyone he loves age and die. Yep, this is one for fans of Audrey Niffenegger’s The Time Traveler’s Wife.
A more liberal society has meant that romances are harder to write than in previous centuries, as lovers fail to be kept apart by impediments other than their own shortcomings. Authors have to work doubly hard, it seems, even creating whole new genetic disorders to keep blameless lovers yearning. There is always the risk of self-indulgence in novels driven by their own audacious central conceit, but luckily Matt Haig has a real feeling for what it is to be an outsider, and makes you entirely believe in the weariness of the centuries-old “albas” (albatrosses) secretly living among the rest of us giddily short-lived “mays” (mayflies). The strangeness of this parallel universe throws our own into relief, so that we see time not as a tyranny, but as a social glue that binds us and allows us kinship. And along the way there are, as you’d expect from Haig, many quirks and quips. Why worry about the future? “It always happens. That’s the thing about the future.”
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via Science fiction | The Guardian http://ift.tt/2tQc9z5
