I’ll admit my bias straight up: I love time travel plots, they’re far and away my favourite SF theme. The Time Traveler’s Wife is basically a well-crafted love story (though with some clunkily awful dialogue at times) using time travel as the impetus and block of the relationship.

Henry is a time-traveller, but he cannot control where and when he goes. Clare is his wife who has to cope with his frequent disappearances. Theirs is not a linear relationship: because of the nature of time travel, she meets him for the first time before he meets her for the first time (a useful little paradox used recently in Doctor Who). She meets him when she still is a child and he is an adult, and he is aware she will grow up to be his wife…not quite as creepy as it sounds, because it’s handled pretty well.

The book is a portrait of their relationship, shifting backwards and forward in time over the course of their entire relationship, and generally making excellent use of the various paradoxes of time travel and the pathos of knowing or guessing in advance what will happen because of clues and hints, building inevitably to the foregone outcome.

Niffenegger covers it pretty well, keeps good track of where the story’s at despite the shifting times, and is expert at laying down the groundwork to make a sweet and sad and drawn-together climax. At the level of the book club, where it’s popular, it does its job (ooh, that sounds harsh; I did like this book, though I’m ambivalent about the ending, or at least my interpretation of it).

As a SF book (which, of course, because it’s mainstream popular, it couldn’t possibly be), I did feel it treated the topic somewhat superficially: I thought it could have come to deeper conclusions about the nature of involuntary time travel than it did.

Niffenegger has written a couple of other books which draw more on her background as an artist. More information can be found here, though that site is a little under-nourished. This interview might have a bit more meat to it.

Interested? Buy it from Fishpond.com.au