The Time Traveler's Wife
by Audrey Niffenegger
532pp, Jonathan Cape, £12.99
Audrey Niffenegger throws you into a pretty perplexing scenario at the start of The Time Traveler's Wife. Here are a woman and a man meeting in a Chicago library, but while Clare clearly knows Henry and has done for ages, Henry doesn't have a clue who she is. This, we gradually understand, is because he has been travelling from his future to her past, and in that past they fell in love, so he hasn't yet met her in his own present. Somehow, that tangled mess of tenses sorts out on the page into a scene that is entirely comprehensible and rather charming.
Niffenegger goes on to exploit the possibilities of her fantasy scenario with immense skill: no wonder this first novel has spent weeks on the bestseller lists in the US. Her version of time travel lends itself to neat comedy - it is an uncontrollable condition, which means Henry can find himself sucked out of the present and thrown naked into another time and place at any moment.
For instance, when Clare and Henry finally get married, with all their family and friends in attendance, he is maddeningly whisked away just before the ceremony. But luckily, through one of the sweet coincidences that is a feature of Niffenegger's world, an older Henry falls through the years to take his place, and only the most observant of guests wonders about his suddenly grizzled appearance.
Even at such a carefully composed moment of comedy, Niffenegger keeps the pitch tuned not just to the mechanics of her magical world, but also to the emotions of the couple. This is what saves this novel from being just a childish joke: her ability to mesh the japes with a careful grounding in the dynamics of character and relationship. Take away the time travel, and you have a writer reminiscent of Anne Tyler and Carol Shields, who captures the rhythms of intimacy, who burrows into the particularities of family life. Because she builds this scaffolding of domesticity, what you remember is the realism as well as the fantasy, and through much of the book the time travel works to enhance the reality rather than take over from it.
When Clare first makes love with Henry she is 18, but he has travelled back in time, and in his present he is 41, has been married to her for years, and is finding their relationship going through a bad patch. After they make love, he is pulled back into his present with the thirtysomething Clare, who is waiting for him crossly: "Henry's been gone for almost 24 hours now, and as usual I'm torn between thinking obsessively about when and where he might be and being pissed at him for not being here... I hear Henry whistling as he comes up the path through the garden, into the studio. He stomps the snow off his boots and shrugs off his coat. He's looking marvellous, really happy. My heart is racing and I take a wild guess: 'May 24, 1989?' 'Yes, oh yes,' Henry scoops me up, and swings me around. Now I'm laughing; we're both laughing."
This scene epitomises the best thing about this book, which is the way Niffenegger uses time travel as a way of expressing the sense of slippage that you get in any relationship - that you could be living through a slightly different love story from the one your partner is experiencing. And she certainly weaves her plot well. This is one of those books that makes you want to eat it up from start to finish, eager to see how the twisted curves of time will be straightened out. But despite the way that I felt sucked through the novel, the book's limitations eventually begin to grate.
Although at first you might think Niffenegger wanted to disturb the quiet tone of American domestic life with her madcap scenarios, gradually you realise this is a wholly reassuring narrative. Henry may sometimes find himself at war with the laws of space and time, but at heart he has a "fanatical dedication to living like a normal person". The triumph of the book is the triumph of normality, of setting up a decent family life even if you are constantly dissappearing from it, of being loyal to somebody with what Niffenegger finally explains as a genetic dysfunction - chrono-displacement, as she calls it.
Rather like Alice Sebold's The Lovely Bones, in which a girl looks down from heaven after her death and even manages to intervene in the lives of those left behind, The Time Traveler's Wife sets up a very benign kind of magic. Although his time travelling often exposes Henry to danger and embarrassment, it also serves to smooth out the rawness of lived experience. Because Henry can visit the future, he can not only buy a winning lottery ticket if necessary, he can also see the house he and Clare will live in, and even be sure they will be married and have a child.
That certainty about the future gives both of them a quasi-religious sense that their lives are already mapped out, and the time of their deaths already written. In a couple of particularly sentimental scenes, Henry manages to visit Clare and his daughter after his own death, and in those moments there is the evanescent comfort of a vague spirituality. By the time Niffenegger begins to tune up the violins for the swoony sweet ending you knew was on the cards, the magic has taken over from the realism, to the cost of the book's potential impact.
· Natasha Walter's The New Feminism is published by Virago