How to Stop Time by Matt Haig Review
Tom Hazard has an extremely rare condition chosen anageria which means he ages extremely slowly. He is one of a tiny grouping of people who live for many hundreds of years. Tom was born in London in 1581 and mixed with the likes of Shakespeare and Marlowe in his youth, worked for Captain Cook in the 1700s and was a jazz pianist in Paris in the 1920s where he met, among others, F Scott Fitzgerald and watched Josephine Baker dance. What an incredibly lucky guy, you might think, but his condition is a curse and does not go unnoticed. He is haunted by the fact that his mother was condemned as a witch in the pocket-size village in which they lived, considering the locals suspected dark forces at play when her teenage son appeared never to age. In his 'late teens' he meets and falls in beloved with Rose, and they have a child, Marion. Rose is the love of Tom's life and although they move around, trying to avoid staying in one identify besides long and attracting attending, he realises that his existence presents a danger to Rose and the child. He has no choice but to leave her. The final time Tom sees Rose is when she is in her 50s, on her death bed with the plague, while he still looks like the young homo she barbarous in dearest with many years earlier.
Tom has to spend his long and eventful life dodging attention, changing location every eight years or so. He, and others with his condition, are part of a worldwide secret organisation known as Albatross, led past the slightly sinister now elderly Dutchman, Hendrick. 'Albas', every bit they are known, are committed to keeping their condition cloak-and-dagger and thereby protecting themselves from scrutiny. They fear discovery by the scientific community and what this might mean. Superstition has treated them badly in the by. Hendrick rules the organisation and controls its members, cleverly maintaining their loyalty with a delicate residuum of threat and the promise of protection.
Merely Tom is unhappy. His condition brings him zippo but pain and grief. He lost his female parent in brutal circumstances and his wife and daughter, all because of anageria. Hendrick keeps him close by telling him that his daughter Marion has inherited the condition and assuring Tom that he will find her, but Tom becomes increasingly suspicious of Hendrick's motives.
In the present day, Tom's new role is as a history teacher in an east London secondary school. He is a success, begetting the uncanny ability to 'bring history alive' to fifty-fifty the most apathetic of his students. At the schoolhouse Tom meets Camille, a young French teacher, to whom he is attracted. The feeling is mutual, but of course, Tom knows a relationship is impossible. Tom's inconsistent behaviour towards Camille makes her suspicious.
Thus, the scene is set for a complex and fascinating plot. The novel jumps back and forth in fourth dimension from present solar day east London to Shakespearean London, where Tom was a renowned lute actor, to the 18th century where Tom sailed to the Indies with Cook, to more recent times when Tom has had to comport out certain international missions to serve the secret organisation.
Haig creates a huge range of interesting characters and information technology is quite an achievement that he gives them all a depth and uniqueness, which many writers could only reach with a much smaller cast. The volume was not at all difficult to follow, despite the frequent changes of era and setting. For me, my favourite sections were the present-24-hour interval ones, though, as Tom explored with great poignancy the tragedy of his being which means he cannot build intimate connection with anyone outside the system, for fear not merely of exposing himself but of placing them in danger; bad things happen to people who find out near the Albas. Tom is alone and alone. The people he has loved are all gone and then he fears beloved. The recounting of by events in Tom's life assist to create and broaden the picture of his existence where an overly extended life is a curse not something to be striven for. The unnaturalness of Tom's situation, the burden he must bear, is profoundly portrayed.
I listened to this book on sound and the narrator, Mark Meadows, was first-class, developing an impressive range of distinctive voices and accents to distinguish the different characters. He too conveyed well a sense of Tom'due south building frustration and despair, so much so that his final actions in the volume are non merely plausible, but completely inevitable.
I recommend this book highly.
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Source: https://julias-books.com/2018/07/21/book-review-how-to-stop-time-by-matt-haig/
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