![]() It’s an obsession, but one that provides Emmett with a clear sense and purpose. Still, I did like how Emmett grows from a fusty, pretentious bibliophile into a man deeply invested in charting Tom and Ben’s appearances throughout history. And while, Tom’s letters to Ben that Emmett finds stuck between the pages of Time Was (the book, not the novella), provide a little more detail, it seems a missed opportunity that Emmett never discovers a letter from Ben to Tom. His chapters are much shorter and only provide a glimpse into his affair with Ben, how they met, how they fell in love. The way he pieces it all together, with the help of Thorn, is page-turning stuff and yet I could have done with more from Tom’s perspective, set in the past. The story is mostly set in the present day detailing Emmett’s search for evidence of Tom and Ben. I find it fitting that a time-travel story should feature an old book, not as a magical MacGuffin but as the physical (as distinct from quantum) thread that binds two lovers together. Ian McDonald’s Time Was is a beautiful, well-observed novella about war and love but also (and maybe most important of all, at least to me) the lost joy of picking up a novel in a second-hand bookstore and smelling its age, appreciating the decades stored in its yellowed pages. ![]()
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