At first, fans of time travel novels and short stories might
not know what to make of Michael Landweber’s Thursday 1:17 P.M. After
all, the novel’s narrator/hero (a teenager whom everyone calls Duck) moves
neither forward nor backward in time during the entire novel. Duck would, in fact, be perfectly happy if he
could simply figure out how to get time started again, because right now he is
the only thing moving in a world in which every other living thing and machine
is frozen solid at 1:17 on the worst Thursday afternoon of his life.
How bad a day is Duck having? Well, consider this: minutes earlier, he
walked away from his mother’s deathbed; his father is institutionalized; and Duck
has just stepped directly into the path of the speeding car that is destined to
smash him into pieces. But suddenly the
clock stops ticking, and Duck finds himself staring into the eyes of the driver
who is about to crush him. So he simply
steps away from the intersection.
Thus begins one of the strangest coming-of-age novels a
reader is ever likely to encounter. Duck
will be eighteen years old tomorrow – but will tomorrow ever get here, or is
Duck destined to remain forever a seventeen-year-old boy grieving the loss of
his mother?
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| Michael Landweber |
Survival proves to be surprisingly easy in a world in which
everything is literally frozen in in the instant during which time stopped. Washington D.C. grocery stores are filled
with food and drink that never spoils; the temperature never varies; shelter is
available everywhere Duck turns (if he can just figure out when it is time to
get some sleep); and everything in the nearby shopping mall is his for the
taking. All around him, people are
frozen in the act of walking, falling, fighting, or making love. Everyone but Duck is waiting for the next
tick of the clock to determine their fate.
Now what?
Ironically, it a world in which time has frozen, Duck has
nothing but time on his hands, time
to think about his past, time to miss his parents and his friends, and time to
figure out what he would do differently if only the rest of the world would
catch up with him again. But in order to
do any of these things, first he has to figure out a way to get time flowing. Can a boy really come-of-age in a world in
which he lives entirely alone, or is his situation akin to the tree that falls
in the forest when no one is around to hear it hit the ground?
(Review Copy provided by Publisher)
That sounds interesting. Definitely an original premise.
ReplyDeleteFirst time I've run into it, for sure. Left open a lot of possibilities for a kid fighting hormones and a prankiish nature. He took cow-tipping to new heights, for instance, and had to fight hard to keep his morals in place.
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