TIME AND AGAIN (1970)
By Jack Finney
Simon and Schuster, 398 pages.
★★★
I’ve long been a fan of time travel books. Back in 1970, I read Time and Again by Jack Finney. I had forgotten about it until it reappeared from the deep recesses of a closet. It’s not science fiction per se. In a little-discussed aspect of Albert Einstein’s special theory of relativity, the present, the future, and the past exist in the same time block. Don’t push me any further as my physics and mathematics are not up to the task, but it’s connected to space-time theory. Apparently, Einstein also believed that traveling into the future would be easier than going back in time, which could violate causality principles. From what I gather, he didn’t think a machine could be built that could travel fast (or slowly) enough to allow time travel.
Einstein’s name carries more gravitas than that of the average science fiction writer, which explains why Einstein is so often invoked in time travel novels. Finney’s Time and Again is one of them. Its 1970 publication date coincided with American trips to the moon, the Cold War, the first Earth Day, and bookstands selling non-fiction books such as Future Shock, The Population Bomb, and The Year of the Quiet Sun. Logician/mathematician Kurt Gödel’s 1949 “rotating universes” theorem allowed for travel to the past, as would later quantum physics (though not for people).
Is it possible? That’s way above my pay grade, but novelists have found it irresistible. Finney’s fictional character Si(las) Morely is the central figure of a government-funded program in Time After Time. His handler Dr. Danzinger believed that a properly trained candidate could literally walk from the present into the past after a regimen of familiarization, self-hypnosis, and pre-preparation, a novel (ahem!) way of changing the position of the observer. New Yorker Si Morely is housed in the Dakota Hotel, grows a beard, wears 19th century clothing, and reads period newspapers as a prelude for a stroll into the New York City of 1882. His task is to watch a man who is enigmatically linked to Kate, Si’s 1970 girlfriend, mail a letter at the post office. Si is a professional illustrator also asked to keep notes and make sketches of things he observes. Si has his doubts until the day he gazes across 72nd Street at snowy Central Park and indeed walks into the past. He is naturally astonished.
Thinking back to 1970, New York was not then a nice place. Like many U.S. cities of 1970s, the air and water were polluted and the streets were crowded, noisy, filthy, and crime-riven. Racial tension, garbage strikes, abandoned buildings, and homelessness were prevalent. Hippies commandeered Washington Square, the Bowery was a repository of alcoholics, and the city was close to insolvency. Imagine Morely’s astonishment of watching families joyously riding sleighs, farmsteads within sight of the Dakota, boarding horse-drawn trolleys or steam-driven trains on the Ninth Avenue El, being able to see the Museum of Natural History sitting alone, viewing the arm and torch of the future Statue of Liberty in Madison Square Park, or climbing the stairs of the Trinity Church steeple, then the city’s tallest structure!
Si makes several trips back and forth to 1970 and 1882–once with Kate–and each time immerses himself deeper in the world of 1882. In good Victorian style, a melodramatic side story develops. Si was supposed to be careful not to alter history, though he finds himself falling in love with Julia, a woman at his boarding house. She is betrothed to Jake Pickering, whom Si suspects is a rogue. To say more would be a spoiler. Finney does a good job of ratcheting the tension of a wild chase, a discovery, and a fire. If that’s not melodrama, I don’t know what is.
A final way in which Time and Again is very much tied to 1970 is that today we would label parts of the book sexist, not in a physically abusive way but certainly in its gender assumptions. Finney’s book is called “An Illustrated Novel” for its use of period photos and sketches, some of which are invented and others pulled from archival sources. Its greatest virtue is taking us inside the worldview of 1882. Sit down, take a chaw of tobacco, and try to hit the spittoon! If you could journey to the past, where would you go and would you stay?
Rob Weir
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