Tom Hazard teaches Tudor history to a room of fifteen-year-olds in East London, and the joke Haig sets up in the first chapter is that Tom was there. Not metaphorically. He stood on Bankside when the theaters were new and the river stank, and now he is at a whiteboard explaining Henry VIII to teenagers who mainly want to know whether it will be on the exam. He cannot say a word about any of it. That is the shape of the entire novel, an enormous quantity of experience with nowhere to put it down.
The condition is called anageria, and Tom ages roughly a year for every fifteen. The book opens its account in 1599, in a Suffolk village that has worked out that the boy is not changing, and settles the question the way such villages did. What happens to his mother in that pond takes about a page and a half, written without decoration, and it sets the temperature for everything after. Haig is very good at the physical past. The London chapters have mud in them, and rot, and the particular noise of a crowd that has paid to watch somebody perform. When Tom plays lute in a Bankside playhouse the scene lands because the theater is a business with a wet floor rather than a heritage site.
Then Hendrich turns up. He runs the Albatross Society, which finds people like Tom, protects them from the doctors who would very much like to open them up, and charges an unusual fee: a new identity every eight years, service when it is asked for, and one rule above all the others. Never fall in love. The novel is built on that rule the way a house is built on a beam. Tom's centuries arrive as flashback, cut into the present-day chapters, and Haig manages the transitions with more control than a structure like that usually permits. He also lets Tom have headaches. Four hundred years of memory hurts, physically, and I liked a book that bothered to make immortality inconvenient.
The weakest thread is the guest list. Tom's centuries take him past Shakespeare, onto Captain Cook's Endeavour, into the Paris of Josephine Baker, and by the third or fourth encounter the effect is of a costume box being emptied. The prose seems to sense this and moves briskly, but there are stretches where the historical tour crowds out the man taking it. The present-day resolution runs fast too. A threat the book spends three hundred pages assembling comes apart in far fewer pages than it took to build.
What holds everything together is Marion. Tom's daughter inherited his condition and disappeared, and the search for her is the real spine here, running under the romance and the Society and the historical postcards. Four centuries of looking for one person could turn maudlin inside a paragraph. Haig keeps it dry. Tom never weeps at us. He just keeps checking, decade after decade, with the manner of someone who accepted long ago that checking is now his personality. The moments that come closest to unbearable are small and administrative. A name checked against a parish register. A face half-glimpsed in a crowd and lost again. A rumor followed across a continent to nothing at all. Haig understands that a search this long stops being a quest and becomes a habit, and that the habit is the grief.
The present-day love story with Camille, a French teacher at his school, is the slightest thing in the novel, and I doubt that is an accident. It is supposed to feel small and ordinary beside Elizabethan London and the South Pacific, because the argument Haig is making depends on it. An unremarkable Tuesday with someone you like is the thing four hundred years of history keeps failing to beat.
Why you should read
- Great if The Time Traveler's Wife left a mark
- Historical fiction that hops eras without losing the thread
- Love stories that take the long, patient route
- Readers who wanted more of The Midnight Library's warmth
What to expect
- Present-day London interleaved with four centuries of flashback
- Set pieces from Elizabethan Bankside to jazz-age Paris
- A gentle romance that is not the engine of the book
- About 330 pages, unhurried on purpose
There is a strand of thinking in the book about all of us being time travelers, moving forward at one second per second, which in less careful hands would be a fridge magnet. It works here because Tom has the comparison to hand. He watched the plague take a street. He watched a war, and then the whole twentieth century, at the speed it actually happened. The thing he cannot get over is how quickly one good afternoon goes.
