Charlie is an odd boy who moves through life unnoticed. Literally.
People don’t see him, people look away and even his own mother forgets his
name. He is utterly forgettable.
Until he runs into and battles a clockwork man and finds
himself falling through a portal to 18th century London – and meets
a girl who can see him, a girl who can remember him, a girl who is out of time
like himself.
But Yvaine has her own problems, a child, and a cruel gang she’s had to join to survive the streets of London who is not so quick to abandon her life to help him back to his own time. But more than their own stories, their presence has damaged the time, especially the accidental death of a young Ben Franklin. Now the future itself has been drastically changed and it’s a scramble to see if they can fix it, save Yvaine’s family and learn more about themselves
But there’s also a question of not just whether they can
fix it – but also whether they should.
This book is definitely one to get your teeth into – a complicated
time traveller world, leaping back and forth up and down the time line and
trying to ensure the future stays right.
Of course, one of the advanced questions it asks is what
is the right future, really? After all, how can any of them be sure what the
time line is supposed to look like? Are the Tick-Tocks trying to bring about a
change back to where they, their technology and their future is dominant – or are
they fighting to bring back a future that was that other time travellers have
already changed? Are they restoring the time line or changing it? Is it a
time-travellers duty to change the time line? Is it their duty to preserve it?
It’s a wonderfully twisty, confusing world with lots of
potentials and lots of excellent unknowns. We don’t know this, they don’t know
the answers. The clues are scattered throughout time and need considerable
research and translation to decipher the keys of history, to discover which
individuals are pivot points on which all of time can change.
And the story isn’t about that
Oh, this complicated world certainly takes up a lot of
the book. It influences everything and is part of everything and every decision
has to consider it and a huge amount of it is explored. But this isn’t a book
about philosophy or temporal musings with lots of dry info-dumps. This is the
story of Charlie, clumsy new time traveller stumbling through the world and
these revelations. Much of this he learns through trial and error and occasional
insights and philosophies from people who, they themselves, have only a limited
understanding. We get this excellent world show cased through the lens of a
character and his more mundane wishes – trying to get home and his burgeoning
relationship with Yvaine. In other books I’ve complained that an excellent world
and concept has gone unexplored in favour of telling a clichéd romance – but in
this book it works. This book needs the mundane to anchor the philosophical, it
needs this basic, human story to balance the abstract of the concept and the
world. It needed grounding so it isn’t all theoretical and concept dominated.
