I think if the protagonist of Matt Haig’s How to Stop Time had ever met Tennyson, he would have punched the poet for writing, “It is better to have loved and lost than to have never loved at all.” Tom Hazard loved once, but had to leave his great love because he was aging at such a slow rate that the locals mocked them or whispered about witchcraft. Ever since, he has wandered through his long life missing her and wondering what he’s supposed to do with himself.
We meet Tom as he begins yet another new job, as a history teacher in London. He’s just finished a “task” for his boss, another anagerian named Heinrich, in return for a new identity—and the promise that Heinrich will find the daughter Tom lost shortly after the turn of the seventeenth century. Tom suffers from memory headaches. In London, he is surrounded by memories that send him reeling painfully back through the centuries. We get frequent flashbacks to the 1590s, the early 1600s, the late 1800s, and the 1920s.
Heinrich is paranoid about other people discovering the secret of the anagerians, albatrosses as they call themselves. He worries that they will become lab rats. His fear leads him to send people like Tom to kill people who’ve discovered or endangered their secret. This conflict, along with Tom’s melancholy and loneliness, give the book shape. For me, however, the fun parts were reading about Tom as he bumped into famous people, played jazz, or dodged witchfinders.
Because I’ve recently read books about people out of time (The Outcasts of Time) or who were extraordinarily long lived (Eternal Life), I was a little hesitant to start yet another book with a similar theme. I was happy to find that How to Stop Time contains enough elements of a thriller to be different and that the characters were so interesting that I didn’t mind reading another book about an immortal with weltschmerz.
I received a free copy of this book from the publisher via Edelweiss, for review consideration. It will be released 6 February 2018.