‘The Time Traveler’s Wife’ explores a romantic relationship between protagonists Clare and Henry, with the backdrop of time travel. Time travel in general is a fascinating premise, and its conceptualization by author Audrey Niffenegger is unique in several ways. And yet, what interests a reader like me is not the ways in which time travel makes this love story unique, but the ways in which the unique setting facilitates showing more clearly its shared and common strands with all love stories.Henry is a time traveler because of a genetic peculiarity. However, the book is not titled ‘The Time Traveler’, but ‘The Time Traveler’s Wife’ because it is through the story of Clare that the highs and lows of love and loss manifest most clearly.
Henry meets Clare when she is all of six, but he is a grown man already married to an older version of her. Clare finds out that she will marry Henry in the future, and thus her childhood and adolescence are spent in secret meetings with Henry as and when he appears in her father’s estate (neither of them has any control over when he appears). Clare shuns other ‘normal’ relationships with boys her own age. Much of her adolescence is spent pining for a man who wouldn’t touch her till she is 18.
When they both meet eventually in the ‘now’, the young Henry does not know her at all, and is in a relationship with someone else. They do of course fall in love in the ‘now’ and get married eventually, not without Clare spending days and weeks worried about when Henry goes missing on his time travels. She is left picking up his clothes from the spots where he disappears.
What triggers Henry to disappear is stress. Any time situations become overwhelming, Clare is left all alone as Henry time travels. And yet, more than once, there is a different version of Henry- from the past or the future, who steps in for Henry-from-the-now gone missing. A significant one being when Clare is almost abandoned at the altar, but an older version of Henry appears in order to take the vows.
And so emerge the common strands of relationships. Even without time travel, partners often find themselves in different stages of emotional trajectories- one waiting for the other to arrive, or missing the other just as one arrives. Lovers don’t always meet at the right time. And when the time is right, they don’t always know what they must do. And so much of life is spent waiting for the other to be where one is, or trying to reach where the other needs one to be.
Even when both are in the same place, one may- and perhaps will- fail to be exactly what the other needs. But what is important is that some version of the significant other does show up- it will not be exactly what one needs or expects in that moment, but it will be the best the other can offer. It might have taken them everything (perhaps short of traveling through decades) to be that imperfect-but-there version in that moment.
Back to the plot, the disappearances on account of time travel unfortunately are not the least of mishaps in the protagonists’ lives. And at one point, after I had been cribbing about how the book was going on and on without much happening, I suddenly found myself living through pages (around when Henry meets his daughter in the future while she is being born in the now) which made me put the book aside and start crying. It broke my heart.
This does not happen everyday, and so I know that these were the pages the writer wrote on days when real inspiration had visited her. There are couple of parts of the book which I could tell are the ones that actually got the writer to write this book- the rest of the stuff had to be written because those parts needed to be told.
For the parts of the book which are not the result of moments visited by inspiration, I’d say this- I would have liked to know more. More about the people in the book- while there are many events and comings and goings, I would find it difficult to confidently describe in five words the personalities/ characters of the protagonists. Also, to know more about the world they live in- and not just the two protagonists. Perhaps this is by design, to reflect their attention on and obsession with only each other.
And in general for the length of the book, I would have liked more richness and more depth. Everything seemed too ‘physical’ to me. It is not clear how Clare’s and Henry’s personalities attracted or complemented each other. Why they found each other as irresistible as they did. The relationship between Clare and Henry even seems too anchored on the physical plane, as they always seem to be launching into sex the moment they are alone together. The writer even deliberately draws attention to this, however one eventually realizes that this is critical to making a plot twist work.
What’s definitely bizarre, though, is how their common friend Gomez had a long time crush on Clare; and his wife, Clare’s best friend Charisse, told Henry she was worried that Gomez would definitely leave her for Clare if something happened to Henry. After she and Gomez had been married for years and had three kids. In what world does a woman in Charisse’s position, just accept this as a matter of fact and proceed with marriage, 3 children and continued friendship with this knowledge?
Well, sure enough, he tries when something does happen to Henry. But despite Henry’s message to her to move on with her life, Clare spends the rest of her days once again waiting for him, this time with a vague hope of a chance meeting towards the end of her own life. The book ends with a deep sense of sadness as well as quiet contentment, like one has peeked into the infinite dark space that surrounds all universe, and there is a spiritual, immutable, overwhelmingly unsettling as well reassuring quality to it.
