Time and Time Again Book Synopsis

I bought "Fourth dimension And Time Again" because Ben Elton wrote it and because the cover art (unlike the title) is original and intriguing.

What I got was initially a lot of fun but finally became something vicious, depressing, and horribly plausible.

I was so surprised that, as I finished the book, I found myself feeling aroused at Ben Elton for having broken the implicit contract between writer and reader about the blazon of experience I'd signed up for. If I'd reviewed the book correct and so, it would have pitched between a confused "WTF was that?" and a disappointed "How could he exercise that to me?"

Fortunately, I didn't have fourth dimension to write anything right away because, as the days passed, I couldn't get the book out of my caput and I started to understand what Ben Elton had really done.

To be honest, I wish he hadn't done it but y'all can't unread a book and I can't undo the fact that Ben Elton has abraded my smug view of history as a narrative and left me with something raw and bleeding and much less romantic.

Normally, I enjoy the fourth dimension travel trope. Who doesn't desire to speculate on how things would take turned out "if just"? Normally, I look a spectacle of altered cause and changed upshot that moves speedily enough to keep me giddy and off balance while feeling slightly smug almost knowing (at least some of) the history and getting a vicarious tingle from the new possibilities.

"Time And Time Again" starts off like that. in 2025, our hero, an ex-SAS Captain with a degree in history from Trinity College Cambridge, a flair for languages, and a tragedy in his recent by that has destroyed his volition to alive, is recruited past his old History Professor to take reward of a once-in-a-lifetime adventure to travel dorsum to 1914 and terminate the Great State of war.

The details are original and fun so I won't share them here but in a relatively short time, our twenty-first century Captain is in Istanbul in 1914, bumping upwards against the obnoxious behaviour of privileged Brits and trying to movement w without existence noticed. He has to sit down on his acrimony at the Brits of the day considering not to exercise and then would put his mission, to save the world from a war that would destroy a generation, at gamble.

The fun continues when, travelling w on the Orient Express, he meets a young Irish Suffragette and falls instantly in animalism. The exchanges between them made me laugh out loud. He can't go along 20-beginning-century idioms out of his speech and she is swept away by his New Man views on sexual equality. When he quotes the yet-to-exist Mao and say that "Women concur up half the heaven" she practically wants to have him where he sits.

At this bespeak, I settled down into the volume, thinking I'd institute a romance/thriller that would turn out to be a John Buchanan manner ripping practiced read.

I should have remembered that I was reading Ben Elton. His books are never that simple.

As the story progressed. I started to feel less and less comfortable with Our Her0's certainty that he was correct and that the mission to save the world justified any action he needed to accept and any casualties that might be suffered along the way, but I was yet wrapped upwards in the thriller aspects of the plot. I wanted to know what happened side by side. I wanted to know how he pulled it off.

As more and more things started to become wrong, I could see fewer and fewer ways for Our Hero to win. I got all the mode to the point where Ben Elton stepped outside Our Hero's narrative to reframe the story before information technology occurred to me that, perhaps, winning hadn't been the real objective of the story.

The final section of the book, subsequently the reframing, is shocking,  savage, and hard to look away from. Information technology seems to challenge all the assumptions that the rest of the volume was built on, but what it really challenged was all the assumptions made past Our Hero, destroying his belief in his mission, his values and his whole view of history. He was raised to view history either equally Romantic (shaped by the actions of individuals) or Deterministic (progressing along an inevitable path, shaped by socio-economic forces). This is pretty much how I was raised too. By the cease of the book, Ben Elton has made me see that either view of history is cocky-serving, creating a comfortable narrative that gives me a context I can live with. So going back in time to change the narrative is fundamentally pointless. The real point of history is that is was somebody's present and they had to deal with whatever that present threw at them.

I recommend this book every bit a fascinating but uncomfortable read. Which, thinking about it, I could use as a description of almost all of Ben Elton's books.

My enjoyment of the "Fourth dimension And Time Once more"was profoundly increased by the achieved narration delivered past Jot Davies. If you desire to hear him at work, click on the SoundCloud link beneath.

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Source: https://mikefinnsfiction.com/2016/05/07/time-and-time-again-by-ben-elton-what-if-time-travel-story-that-turns-from-boys-own-adventure-into-something-dark-bleak-and-pitiless/

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