Time Travel Without Your Dental Fillings

When it was first released, some five years ago, Audrey Niffenegger’s novel caught my attention because of the title alone. The Time Traveler’s Wife. It made me think of some absent-minded inventor, tinkering away on a H.G. Well’s style time machine. His experiments would result in frequent travels across past and future, leaving his wife alone at home.

Finally having read the book, I can report that my interpretation of the title does not do the book justice.

Niffenegger’s time traveler, a Chicago librarian, Henry DeTamble, is far from an absent-minded professor type. Instead, he suffers from a genetic disorder that causes him to disappear and reappear at different points in time and space.

No retro clockwork
contraption needed

The story opens with Henry meeting an artist, Clare Abshire, who already knows everything about him. As yet unknown to Henry, in the coming years he will time travel to the past, meeting her when she’s just a little girl. Over a course of many visits, spanning her entire adolescence, she falls in love with this future version of Henry.

What I found most appealing from a metaphysical point of view was this idea of uncontrollable travel through space and time…

Time travel and reincarnation

Our own inability to control our future incarnations may represent the far-reaching appeal this novel has had.

For all of us, death will come followed by rebirth at some point in the future, in an as yet unknown location. To our mortal egos this soul migration from body to body, culture to culture (and sometimes planet to planet) seems largely out of  control.

More so, we pass into a new time and place without any of our hard-earned possessions or even our identity. In the same way Henry DeTamble’s body will leap into the future or the past, but his clothes (and even his dental fillings) will not.

While the book concludes with no spiritual epiphany to seek a level of consciousness beyond the physical  — such stories sure serve as a prod. Henry’s sees his chaotic time travel as both an adventure and a curse.

Spontaneously appearing naked in the rough side of town, a field of snow, or a public museum, wears away at him as the story unfolds. He’s frozen, soaked, beaten, embarrassed, arrested and chased as he seeks clothes, food and shelter — waiting for his body to return to the present.

The seemingly unfair and sad ending of the story spurs me to meditate deeper and seek the reality beyond the unreliability of a purely material existence. There’s no lasting safety for us mortals, imprisoned by its rigid laws of cause and effect, until we achieve lasting freedom in God’s consciousness.

P.S. You can order a copy of The Time Traveler’s Wife from amazon.com, amazon.ca or amazon.co.uk. Contains candid pre-marital sexual scenes, profanity, drunkenness and adultery. Really not a book of high spiritual values and to be read with due discrimination. The concept’s great. The characters real. The plot captivating. Underneath its wordly demeanor the story itself is about love and the unstability of human love.

P.P.S. Please leave your thoughts in the comment box below or read other readers’ replies…

About the Author: John C. A. Manley writes meaningful science fiction and fantasy novels with a spiritual backbone. You can get a free subscription to his MetaphysicalSF email newsletter and free sample chapters from his novels. Click here to find out more....