Lee Allen's Blog - Posts Tagged "science-fiction"

The Time Traveler's Wife by Audrey Niffenegger

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


A searing, captivating time travel romance.

As a child, Clare Abshire meets the man who will be her future husband.

Yet, it will be many years before Henry DeTamble meets Clare, while she commits to spending a lifetime waiting for this moment to arrive.

For Clare’s husband is a traveller in time, their romance a complex web of interconnected past and future moments, the present all too temporary and fleeting.

‘The Time Traveler’s Wife’ is the debut novel by Audrey Niffenegger, a science-fiction romance that takes us back and forth through time to reveal the complex tapestry of Clare and Henry’s entwined lives, told from the dual perspectives of both characters at different points of their lives. Intricately woven and beautifully written, its non-linear narrative is both captivating and thrilling, the romance immersive and emotional, beautiful and tragic. Henry meets Clare for the first time at his place of work, twenty-eight and twenty years old respectively, having no idea who she is, despite her having known him since she was six, when she meets him for the first time at thirty-six in what will become their special place for many years to come. We also meet Henry at five years old, who meets his future self at twenty-four the first time he time travels, going on to be his own mentor to survive in his uniquely dangerous situation.

Niffenegger weaves a deeply moving and thought-provoking tale, an exhilarating dance through time, a journey through destiny, the tale of two people’s entwined lives, delving deep into the emotional impact of such a relationship on the two central characters, excavating the depth of their emotion and their shared memories - how thrilling and incredible, but also how difficult and heartbreaking. Henry has no control over his travelling, neither when it happens nor when and where he will turn up. Nevertheless, his travelling is often concentric to significant events and people – he continues to revisit his mother’s death, his own childhood, times throughout Clare’s life and the life they share together. He often struggles to keep track of his own timeline, many aspects of his life only becoming clear as he goes on to experience them in real time. All the while, his condition ages him, the danger it presents threatening to one day be impossible to outrun.

I adored this book. For me, the concept of time travel proves to be one of the most romantic (second only to twin flames and soul mates) – this notion that two people are destined to be together, their entire lives entwined to the point where cause and effect blur and their love endures for as long as they live, entirely timeless and unbound by the limitations of a linear lifespan. Throughout, we explore many philosophical questions through the lens of a beautiful love story – touching on themes of free will and consent, fate and determinism, faith and spirituality, physics, evolution and genetics; all wrapped in a deeply human narrative of two people finding each other in the most bizarre of circumstances, never giving up on each other, despite all the challenges - their futile wish for life to simply be normal, their desire to have a child, their hope that a cure can be found for Henry’s condition, the dreams they share for a future that may just be unattainable.

The inevitability of what is to come becomes apparent very early on – what begins must end, and in the case of time travel, it is something perhaps evermore both present and distant – and when we finally see just how it will end, it is heartbreaking. On this tapestry of the impossible, as with all the best works of fiction, we experience something that remains very true to our own lives. We will all, one way or another, lose the people we love. It is inevitable, yet we live every day ignoring it. Yet loss and separation can teach us to truly cherish the time we do have, the moments we share that become precious memory, and that, most of all, the most important of those moments is the one we are in now. Also, perhaps, something else, that no one is ever as truly lost to us as we might believe.

The novel has been adapted for the screen twice – first as a film version in 2009, adapted by Bruce Joel Rubin (writer of ‘Ghost’) and directed by Robert Schwentke; and as a TV series in 2018, written by Steven Moffat (whose work includes ‘Doctor Who’, ‘Sherlock’ and ‘Dracula’ (2020)). Niffenegger has also been working on a sequel, with the working title ‘The Other Husband’, with publication anticipated imminently, the novel having been expected to be completed by 2023.

A truly masterful novel, ‘The Time Traveler’s Wife’ is a timeless tale of love and woe that can be told again and again.



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Lasher by Anne Rice

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


A dark and alluring gothic supernatural thriller, continuing the family saga of the Mayfair witches.

Rowan Mayfair has vanished without a trace. Her husband Michael Curry has been hospitalised since the night of her disappearance. The rest of the Mayfair clan gather around – speculating, in denial, hovering like vultures.

An ancient evil, the demonic entity Lasher, now walks the realm of the living, born of flesh and blood, after centuries of fulfilling the role of dutiful familiar to the Mayfair witches.

Lasher is pursuing his own insidious endgame, a chilling scheme to populate the earth with his progeny.

‘Lasher’ is the second novel in the ‘Lives of the Mayfair Witches’ trilogy by Anne Rice. A dark and twisted Gothic family saga, laced with horror, romance, erotica, philosophy and faith, Rice’s luscious, immersive prose takes us on a delicious and horrific journey into the forbidden, delving back in time and further exploring the past of the Mayfair family, building on the events of the first novel, moving the narrative forwards with a twist of speculative and science fiction, as we meet the wider family in the present day and dig deeper into secrets entwined within their history.

Rice weaves a sublime mix of horror and eroticism, history and villainy, the novel immediately and relentlessly capturing us under its spell. A complex, multi-layered narrative, swirling in mystery and suspense, at times disturbing, often thought-provoking, it explores themes of good and evil, pleasure and pain, genetics and evolution, religion and mythology, survival and sacrifice, forgiveness and vengeance, combining in a mesmerising concoction to tell a tale of power, corruption and tragedy.

Picking up where ‘The Witching Hour’ left off, Rowan has disappeared, escaping with the newborn Lasher after he left Michael for dead. Suffering a dizzying mix of confused emotions, Rowan is imprisoned and raped by her demonic offspring, as he follows his warped desires to impregnate and pleasure her, while experiencing life in the flesh after centuries as a spirit. Meanwhile, Michael returns home from hospital, a lost and broken man, fearing what has become of Rowan and the abomination that was his newborn child.

We are also introduced to the fourteenth designee of the legacy, Mona, only thirteen years old. Intellectually, emotionally and sexually advanced beyond her years, Mona’s relationships are amongst the most controversial elements of the novel. No matter her power and ambition, she is undoubtedly another victim of the curse of the Mayfair legacy and its twisted, seductive darkness. This curse is manifesting in a series of brutal deaths befalling the Mayfair women, the result of rapes and miscarriages, further culmination of a legacy of abuse, incest and trauma. As Rowan manages to affect her escape, she is left comatose after giving birth to yet another unnatural creature.

An encounter with the spirit of Julien Mayfair deepens our understanding of Mayfair history. In the first novel, there was always the feeling there was more to learn from Julien, never regarded as an official designee of the legacy despite his immense power (as interesting reversal of our patriarchal society in that the lineage of witchcraft is a matriarchy) and his relationship with Lasher. We return to perhaps the most decadent period of the Mayfair family’s past, experiencing it from Julien’s perspective, learning of other critical events that occurred surrounding and enriching what we already know.

The mysterious organisation, the Talamasca, investigators of paranormal phenomena through the centuries, continues to be a lurking presence, and may not be as benign and neutrally observant as they claim, leading their own agents Aaron and Yuri to question their motives and turn their backs on them. Through Julien’s story and the involvement of the Talamasca, we unearth Lasher’s history and the mystery of his identity, escalating to a climatic confrontation when we finally hear his confession, which takes us back in British history to a time period that ties beautifully with its religious history and the witchcraft hysteria that will come to grip the country in the succeeding century, when the legacy of the Mayfair witches began and tied them inextricably with the prophecy of the Taltos.

Bewitching and enthralling, ‘Lasher’ is an intense second chapter in an epic gothic saga of witchcraft. I am eagerly anticipating discovering how the trilogy concludes in the final novel, ‘Taltos’.



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