A Review of John Wray’s “The Lost Time Accidents”

Time Stand Still

I’m a sucker for a good time travel book. In fact, The Time Traveler’s Wife is probably my very favourite book of all time, having read it cover to cover at least twice now. So that probably explains why I was drawn to get a review copy of John Wray’s The Lost Time Accidents, even though most of the critical consensus for the book has passed. (It was originally published in 2016.) The book starts out promisingly, but gets sillier and sillier as it goes on. So silly that, by the end, I couldn’t make up my mind if the novel is meant to be a send up of the science fiction genre or the historical family epic. At roughly 500 pages in length, the book drones past the point of expiry. To be honest, dear reader, I didn’t want to finish the book. Finishing it, as I did, proved to be of little consequence — it would have left the same impact on me as abandoning it. The novel just kind of sputters out and ends. That’s it, that’s all.

So what is the book about? There are two narratives. One is from the point of view of the novel’s protagonist, Waldemar Tolliver, who has become stuck in time, writing his family’s history for a married woman that he is pining over. The other narrative, is that history itself, from his grandfather’s discovery of time travel and the theory of relativity in 1903 (at about the same time Albert Einstein was reaching the same conclusions) to his father’s upbringing as a writer to Waldamar’s young life itself. Along the way, there are stops at the Holocaust, and a kind of tarot card deck plays a role.

Basically, you know what The Lost Time Accidents reminds me of? The Illuminatus! Trilogy. Wray has a dry sense of humour — characters stammer and eventually get cut off by other characters in a rather wry kind of way. And some of the writing, especially at the book’s start is zippy and profound. However, it’s clearly evident from this book that John Wray is a very, very smart man. So smart, that he can’t translate his brilliance for the common everyday man. Now, I’ve been told that I’m very smart too, and I probably am, but even I couldn’t make heads or tails of where the plot of the book was going.

I suppose, if you could say anything, The Lost Time Accidents are about memory and the impact of time on our thoughts of loved ones who have departed. However, for a book to make that kind of statement over 500 pages is simply overkill. Don’t get me wrong. I love a big book. I love getting lost in characters and such. But The Lost Time Accidents didn’t need to be 500 pages long. This didn’t need to be a sweeping epic, because most of the page count felt like padding. Still, that’s not the novel’s most egregious faults, not by a long shot.

To be honest, the characters of this book are self-absorbed. I don’t think you don’t get more self-absorbed than pursuing a married person as a love interest. Plus, some of the characters are just too brilliant and educated for their own good, and come across as spoiled instead of being sophisticated. What’s more, Waldamar’s author father is, groan, named Orson Card. (Shades of Orson Scott Card, anyone?) Orson Card writes science-fiction that is somewhat pornographic, but the examples of it that Wray gives us are so preposterously over-the-top that it’s hard to imagine anyone actually publishing it.

What’s more, for a novel that manipulates both time and space, I found it odd that Wray doesn’t really go into detail about his settings. For instance, the early part of the book is set during the turn of the 20th century in Vienna and its cafés and salons, but we don’t really get a clear picture of what they would look like. There’s no sense of place in other words. The author is too busy setting up dazzling literary fireworks about the nature of time and how light affects the passage of time and so on and so forth. Basically, the book might work well as a university dissertation, not so much as a historical novel.

In the end, I don’t know what I think of The Lost Time Accidents. I perversely enjoyed the first 100 or 200 pages, but then found it a slow, labourous chore of a read. I felt that reading this book was out of obligation to the publisher for mailing it to me, and you, dear reader, who may be curious about picking this title up. In any event, I think I wasn’t all that enamoured by The Lost Time Accidents. Just like The Illuminatus! Trilogy before it, I found this book to just get more and more outrageously nonsensical the deeper you get into it. There’s the bond of conspiracy theory that binds this book to its earlier cousin(s) published in 1975, and the styles and tones of both “books” are somewhat reminiscent. If you wanted to know the truth, however, I’d say that The Lost Time Accidents only exists as a showy piece of writing to illustrate just how brilliant John Wray’s brain is. That’s to say it’s far too clever by far.

If you’re looking for an orthodox book on time travel, look elsewhere. If you’re looking for something weird and pseudo-scientific, look here. Your enjoyment of this kind of book is going to hinge upon how much you enjoy the baffling (crickets wind up talking to one of the characters at one point, which just underscores how “out there” this novel is). I’m a fan of the wonderfully demented, but I found that The Lost Time Accidents somehow lost the plot as it delved deeper and deeper into its generational history. I hate to say it, but, for me, at least, The Lost Time Accidents represents reading time that I’ve lost for better books — time that, alas, I will never get back. Too bad. There was a lot of potential here.

John Wray’s The Lost Time Accidents was published by Picador on February 14, 2017, in trade paperback. It was originally published in hardcover in 2016. CLICK TO BUY IT FROM AMAZON INDIA.

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