“Without free will, there is despair”
A review of The Time Traveller’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger

Review by Kara Martin

Readers are fascinated by stories that play with time. Dr Who, Back to the Future, Memento... There are many examples of the genre. Maybe it is because we wish we could glimpse the future. Maybe it is because we wish we could clean up the mess in our past. Maybe there is a desire to simply escape from this place and this moment.
Audrey Niffenegger is also fascinated by the idea of time, especially the “intimacy of time, how ineffable it is, how it shapes us.”
She has written an intriguing book, a romance that spans time, that plays with time. Imagine meeting your life partner, and then journeying back through time to meet them as a child, and watch them grow and develop. That is the story of Henry.
Henry has a medical condition which means that he spontaneously travels through time. Yet it is random: he cannot control when he goes, where he goes, or the date that he reappears.
The time traveler’s wife is Clare. She also is given a voice in the telling of this story. Her story is one of waiting. She has met her husband as an older man, but she must wait for the moment he first sees her, and falls in love, in the timeframe that they share.
Niffenegger has taken a concept and explored it from many angles with great creativity and skill. There could be so much confusion with a plot that has no chronological order. However, the central story of Henry and Clare is compelling.
The result is a book that challenges some of the assumptions we might make. Knowing the future is in fact a great burden for Henry. He is powerless to fix the problems of the past. Rather than an escape, travelling through time is confusing and dangerous for Henry. He ends up longing to be able to be fully present with Clare. He longs for predictability and normality.
In the end, the story indicates that the choices we make are only powerful in the present, and have far-reaching consequences. Niffenegger admits that this is a central theme of the book, and suggests that the absence of free will would lead to despair.
Like the majority of great stories, the plot is a device for us to consider the mystery and delights of relationships, of ordinary events, of everyday choices. This is a book that ultimately impacts on the reader not because of its fantastical elements, but because of the ordinary choices and outcomes of the central characters who have become familiar, people we recognise as being intrinsically the same as us, longing to love and be loved.

KARA MARTIN is a lecturer with Macquarie Christian Studies Institute (www.mcsi.edu.au), and is an avid reader and book group attendee.