We see his struggles to survive alone in Shakespeare’s London (vividly rendered), and his first love affair with a young woman named Rose. We witness his youngest years, when his alien condition got his mother killed for witchcraft. We quickly come to learn that this is indeed Tom’s status, as his narrative skips around among the eras of his long lifetime. It’s always the story of being alienated from the common run of mankind, of a poisoned gift, and, with luck, eventual redemption and acceptance. In fact, one can observe that the trope of the person who is blessed with longevity due to genetics, and not due to technological tampering, overlays that of the mutant who possesses some other talent–telepathy or teleportation or some other wild skill.

His tale brings to mind a couple of classics in this vein, Robert Silverberg’s Dying Inside and Olaf Stapledon’s Odd John. He narrates his own tale, and we are about to take a deep dive into his troubled and deteriorating psyche and insufferable condition, delivered in crisp, arresting, colorful imagery, laden with much earned pathos. His bodily state is dubbed “anageria.” He will age only one physiologic year for every fifteen calendar years, thus granting him a lifetime of a millennium or so. The time of the story is our familiar present day our hero is one Tom Hazard, born in the year 1581 and consequently over four- hundred-years old in the twenty-first century. Can Haig make it new? I think the answer is yes.

(See the entry in The Science Fiction Encyclopedia for an exhaustive list and analysis of the trope.) This is a very potent “power chord,” but one that has been explored quite extensively. The first thing to note about Haig’s newest is that it occupies the genre of speculative tales about immortals or “merely” long-lived individuals, specifically those in hiding amongst us mayflies. Gone is the era when even a dedicated reader could keep up with everything.īut, happily, with the publication of How to Stop Time, he is now on my radar, and it’s never too late to read backwards down the years, every fan his or her own Merlin. I can only blame the incredible and overwhelming plethora of interesting books being produced these days. I am not quite sure how I managed to be ignorant of Matt’s Haig’s work prior to this moment, especially since he has produced twelve prior novels–the first appearing in 2004, and one currently optioned for film–and a non-fiction bestseller. How to Stop Time, by Matt Haig ( Viking 978-7-4, $26, 336pp, hardcover) February 2018

How to stop time matt haig review