Time Travel and Religion
Excerpt from “Why Knot?” Buy the book at Amazon
Time travel/dislocation is one tool for the novelist. It is not intended to be realistic, only plausible. Used well, it can be very effective.
I begin with basic unanswerable questions — what, if anything, comes before life; and what, if anything, comes after. Add to that the mystery that in some sense we remain the same person ro same identity as our body changes radically over the years. Normal life is magic — slow magic, the changes happening so slowly that we don’t notice them until we meet someone we haven’t seen in years or some event shakes us enough so we see our selves in the mirror with fresh eyes. When those same changes happen rapidly, that’s fast magic.
In Nevermind, a couple meet, fall in love, marry, and soon after divorce back during and shortly after WW II. By chance they meet agin 40 years later on a cruise ship and fall for each other again, before they realize who they are.
In Beyond the Fourth Door, two people wake up 40 years older than they were when they fall asleep. They have no memory of what happened during that 40 years, but to those around them they have led normal lives. it isn’t a case of amnesia. It happened to both of them separately. And it turns out that they had been in love but had broken up back in college.
In part 1 of Breeze, a college girl suddenly goes into a coma and her lover/boyfriend tries to cope with the aftermath. In part 2, that same girl wakes up in the body of Briseis in the Trojan War — the story, not the historical Troy. In part 3, she wakes up at the Eleusinian Mysteries as part of a mix-up in an attempt at a kind of deliberate soul transference.
You could say that those three novels explore the same mysteries of life from different, perspectives.
While I don’t put faith in any of the tenets of any religion, my books are all attempts to make sense of life and death and the universe.
