The Lost Time Accidents
John Wray
Canongate, £8.99
Alastair Mabbott
WALDEMAR Tolliver had always suspected that time flies not like an arrow but a boomerang. Now he appears to be trapped inside a bubble of static time in his deceased aunts’ Manhattan apartment. There is a pen and a ream of paper on a card table in front of him and he knows what he must do. He will write about the history of his family, their collective obsession with time and how his namesake, his grandfather’s brother, became consumed by that obsession and dedicated himself to the Third Reich, possibly unlocking the secret of time travel in the process.
This ambitious and pleasingly messy story is rooted in an era of scientific advancement (“a kind of panicked conceptual goldrush”) in Europe at the very beginning of the 20th century. The speed of light having been established as constant, a whole new physics was needed to address the questions arising from that observation alone. Then, in 1903, Waldemar’s great-grandfather, the Moravian gherkin mogul Ottakar Gottfriedens Toula, was killed by an almost stationary car, leaving behind him hints that he had discovered the true nature of time.
Ottakar’s preoccupation with time, inherited by his physicist son Waldemar (the elder), has become something of a family curse. It’s even acquired a name: the Syndrome. The members of his family all learned to refer to Einstein disparagingly as “the Patent Clerk”, reluctant to admit that Einstein got the answer right while Waldemar’s continuation of his father’s work led to nothing more than pseudoscientific babble and Nazi atrocities.
And yet, defying reason, here is Waldemar’s namesake trapped inside something that closely resembles the chronospheres his great-uncle described, with nothing to do but write a family memoir in the hope that his lost love Mrs Haven will read it and understand. His entanglement with Mrs Haven is a consequence of that same history: the husband she is cheating on with Waldemar is the founder of a pseudo-religion inspired by the writings of pulp sci-fi writer Orson Card Tolliver, Waldemar’s father.
Weighing in at 500 pages, John Wray’s fourth novel is a sprawling phantasmagoria which keeps us in delicious suspense as to what Ottakar’s “lost time accidents” actually were, whether Waldemar’s concentration camp experiments actually led to the successful discovery of time travel and where the Church of Synchronology fits in to the scheme of things. It’s provocative, indulgent and fun. But this does come at the expense of the characters and their relationships.
Fin de siecle Vienna is exquisitely evoked, with Kaspar, brother of the elder Waldemar, turning up to a party to find Klimt and Wittgenstein as guests. But Kaspar’s escape to America as the Nazis consolidate their power, and his adjustment to a new homeland, as well as young Waldemar’s affair with Mrs Haven, don’t carry the same emotional charge as Wray’s cosmological flights of fancy. The aspects of the book that should be the most human and relatable don’t resonate as they should. This aside, Wray delivers on other counts in an imaginative and philosophical singularity of a novel.
Why are you making commenting on The Herald only available to subscribers?
It should have been a safe space for informed debate, somewhere for readers to discuss issues around the biggest stories of the day, but all too often the below the line comments on most websites have become bogged down by off-topic discussions and abuse.
heraldscotland.com is tackling this problem by allowing only subscribers to comment.
We are doing this to improve the experience for our loyal readers and we believe it will reduce the ability of trolls and troublemakers, who occasionally find their way onto our site, to abuse our journalists and readers. We also hope it will help the comments section fulfil its promise as a part of Scotland's conversation with itself.
We are lucky at The Herald. We are read by an informed, educated readership who can add their knowledge and insights to our stories.
That is invaluable.
We are making the subscriber-only change to support our valued readers, who tell us they don't want the site cluttered up with irrelevant comments, untruths and abuse.
In the past, the journalist’s job was to collect and distribute information to the audience. Technology means that readers can shape a discussion. We look forward to hearing from you on heraldscotland.com
Comments & Moderation
Readers’ comments: You are personally liable for the content of any comments you upload to this website, so please act responsibly. We do not pre-moderate or monitor readers’ comments appearing on our websites, but we do post-moderate in response to complaints we receive or otherwise when a potential problem comes to our attention. You can make a complaint by using the ‘report this post’ link . We may then apply our discretion under the user terms to amend or delete comments.
Post moderation is undertaken full-time 9am-6pm on weekdays, and on a part-time basis outwith those hours.
Read the rules here