How to Stop Time - Matt Haig

I have been a fan of serious time travel fiction (an oxymoron, I know) for a long time, but these days the genre seems to have morphed into some kind of romance novel/time travel novel combination so I’ve tended to read less and less of it. But I figured if I can’t find a time travel novel I want to read right now, why not one about the slowest kind of time travel possible - a book about a man who has lived for more than four centuries and is still going strong. That’s the premise of Matt Haig’s How to Stop Time, a novel that mostly works but at heart is really another romance novel. 

As the novel opens, Tom Hazard has moved back to London after a long time away and is interviewing for a history teacher job at a private high school. Tom, though, finds it a bit difficult to concentrate on the interview after the school’s young French teacher catches his eye. That’s not too unusual or surprising a reaction from a healthy 41-year-old man like Tom. But the truth is that Tom is not 41 years old; he is 439 years old, and the London he has been walking through all morning bears little resemblance to the city he left behind so long ago. 

Tom has only recently (recently in terms of his true age) learned that there are many others out there like him, people who have lived by their wits for centuries. Tom, a man who sailed with Captain Cook, worked at the Globe Theatre with Shakespeare, and was introduced to the Bloody Mary by Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, has had to run for his own life more than once after superstitious locals noticed that he was not aging. Now he has the support of the Albatross Society, a group whose purpose is to keep the secrets of people like Tom. But unfortunately for Tom, the number one rule of the Albatross Society is a simple one: Never, ever, fall in love.

Matt Haig

Matt Haig uses numerous (maybe I should say countless) flashbacks to tell Tom’s story. That is, of course, the most obvious way to approach a story like this one, but it should have worked much better than it did in this case. The problem here is that there are so many flashbacks that they chop the present-day story into such tiny bites that they just barely move the segment along before another, longer flashback begins. And that can – and did – get very frustrating.  

Bottom Line: How to Stop Time is romantic science fiction that touches lightly, very lightly at that, on a few historical eras and events. Even at its climax it is difficult to believe that anything bad will really happen to Tom or those close to him. It’s not that kind of book, and it isn’t intended to be. I do see that How to Stop Time is soon to be a “major motion picture” starring one of my favorite actors, Benedict Cumberbatch, and I suspect that it will make an entertaining film.