A Review of The Psychology of Time Travel by Kate Mascarenhas

By

The Psychology of Time Travel is a ring of a very strange shape. It’s full of genies and visits from dead people. Characters flit and fly about like stray bullets, from the 1960s to the 24th century. Although the majority of the narration takes place during 2017 and 2018, the action is all over the place, or rather all over the time, and sixty-two chapters assault the readers with titles including thirteen different characters’ names and dates ranging from March 1967 to April 2019. It’s all rather disconcerting and one would do well to stop fretting over details and resign oneself to fate and just read on to enjoy the zaniness of it all as the mystery unravels itself inexorably.


Odette is an archaeology student volunteering at a toy museum. At the beginning of her second shift on the job she finds a body in the basement. The corpse has multiple gunshot wounds. Even weirder, the body is in a room that had been bolt-locked from the inside. The door is the only possible means of egress or ingress. Traumatized, she seeks the help of Ruby, the psychologist whose grandmother helps invent time-travel and whose eventual wife is also a time-traveler.  The inquest into the cause of death and the identity of the victim divines nothing. Unbeknownst to each other, and for their own reasons, both Odette and Ruby begin trying to find answers.

 

Each of them realize those answers exist only inside “The Conclave,” that spooky, quasi-governmental organization which promulgates and regulates time-travel. Both eventually come to realize that The Conclave has a toxic work culture; the result of the tyrannical and corrupt leadership of Margaret, who fears mental illness (for public relations reasons) so much that she essentially instills it in all of her employees. One of the sickest on-the-job-training rituals is “The Angel of Death ritual,” in which green employees are encouraged to forewarn people of the impending death of a loved one. It is common for young time-travellers to express contempt for their older selves once they have met and gotten to know each other. At some point in the novel, as readers follow the characters deeper and deeper down the Dickensian rabbit-hole of this plot, they could be forgiven for predicting that the resolution of the book would be very Murder on the Orient Express. 


In case you had ever thought that time travel was a fun idea, this book might not change your mind. But in case you had ever thought time travelling would make you a better, nicer person, you will learn what is perhaps the point of Grace’s film, Death and the Time Traveler: “When you’re a time traveler, the people you love die, and you carry on seeing them, so their death stops making a difference to you. The only death that will ever change things is your own.”


Maybe. But whose death leaves a body in the basement of a toy museum, how did it happen, and why, and what could the point of any of this be? 


I don’t know. I suppose I’ll have to wait for the story to begin again.


Other helpful reviews:

By Ian Mond Ian Mond Reviews The Psychology of Time Travel by Kate Mascarenhas – Locus Online (locusmag.com)
Avid reader.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

A Review of Moneyball: the art of winning an unfair game by Michael Lewis

By
I’m an American;  so even though Moneyball was published in 2003, I was totally unaware of it until 2011, when the movie of the same name was released (yes, I read books sometimes, but I’m still pretty ignorant). Moneyball is one of my favorite movies. It’s about math (which isn’t my absolute favorite) and baseball (which I’m not all of that interested in, except as a way to spend time outdoors with friends, beer, and snacks), but I don’t even care. It’s also about one (or two, or a few) smart human trying to do something intelligent while surrounded by dumb humans who desperately want to thwart them.  It doesn’t get any more real or any more dramatic than that. In Moneyball (the book) we learn, of course, many things which were not revealed to us onscreen, but the most interesting facets of Michael Lewis’s book are the revelations about the people involved. Bill James, who was portrayed on the big screen as a caricature- security guard at a pork and beans factory who is also ...
Read more

A Review of Ernest Hemingway’s Green Hills of Africa

By
I’m not sure how important, in the modern world, killing animals is, when trying to prove your manhood to anyone else. B’wana Hemingway clearly has his own ideas on the subject. Green Hills of Africa , originally published in 1935, is a brutal slog of an oddly defined thought experiment. The author implies, in a brief foreword, that it is a novel, but claims that “Unlike many novels, none of the characters or incidents in this book is imaginary.” This is a good example of the dry and incisive Hemingway sense of humor (clearly he thinks that some novels contain characters and incidents which are, while purporting to be fictional, in fact real. And he seems to disapprove). Hemingway states that he (he refers to himself as “the writer”) has tried “to write an absolutely true book” in order to see if the product can “compete with a work of fiction.” Emphasis on compete .  Because while the ostensible subject of the book (the “story”?) is how Hemingway, his wife, and some friends went ...
Read more

A Review of Axiom’s End by Lindsay Ellis

By
Okay, wow. That was weird.  In the beginning, we, the readers, are given the impression that Axiom’s End is a novel which primarily concerns government conspiracies. We are introduced to Nils Ortega, a Julian Assange figure, and the trope of press statements, leaked documents, and interview segments scattered throughout the novel, revolving around Nils, with his signature catchphrase “Truth is a Human Right.” But the story quickly comes to revolve around Nils’ daughter Cora, a college dropout and former linguistics student. Yes, there is a government conspiracy centered around a group of aliens called the “Fremda” group, whose existence has long been covered up. Nils, of course, leaks the information to the public with various implications including falling stock prices (author Lindsay Ellis begins each of the four parts of the novel with Dow Jones and NASDAQ averages- those numbers fall as the situation gets more and more out of hand) and eventually the disconcerting resignation o...
Read more