The Lost Time Accidents

John Wray

Canongate, £8.99

Alastair Mabbott

WALDEMAR Tolliver had always suspected that time flies not like an arrow but a boomerang. Now he appears to be trapped inside a bubble of static time in his deceased aunts’ Manhattan apartment. There is a pen and a ream of paper on a card table in front of him and he knows what he must do. He will write about the history of his family, their collective obsession with time and how his namesake, his grandfather’s brother, became consumed by that obsession and dedicated himself to the Third Reich, possibly unlocking the secret of time travel in the process.

This ambitious and pleasingly messy story is rooted in an era of scientific advancement (“a kind of panicked conceptual goldrush”) in Europe at the very beginning of the 20th century. The speed of light having been established as constant, a whole new physics was needed to address the questions arising from that observation alone. Then, in 1903, Waldemar’s great-grandfather, the Moravian gherkin mogul Ottakar Gottfriedens Toula, was killed by an almost stationary car, leaving behind him hints that he had discovered the true nature of time.

Ottakar’s preoccupation with time, inherited by his physicist son Waldemar (the elder), has become something of a family curse. It’s even acquired a name: the Syndrome. The members of his family all learned to refer to Einstein disparagingly as “the Patent Clerk”, reluctant to admit that Einstein got the answer right while Waldemar’s continuation of his father’s work led to nothing more than pseudoscientific babble and Nazi atrocities.

And yet, defying reason, here is Waldemar’s namesake trapped inside something that closely resembles the chronospheres his great-uncle described, with nothing to do but write a family memoir in the hope that his lost love Mrs Haven will read it and understand. His entanglement with Mrs Haven is a consequence of that same history: the husband she is cheating on with Waldemar is the founder of a pseudo-religion inspired by the writings of pulp sci-fi writer Orson Card Tolliver, Waldemar’s father.

Weighing in at 500 pages, John Wray’s fourth novel is a sprawling phantasmagoria which keeps us in delicious suspense as to what Ottakar’s “lost time accidents” actually were, whether Waldemar’s concentration camp experiments actually led to the successful discovery of time travel and where the Church of Synchronology fits in to the scheme of things. It’s provocative, indulgent and fun. But this does come at the expense of the characters and their relationships.

Fin de siecle Vienna is exquisitely evoked, with Kaspar, brother of the elder Waldemar, turning up to a party to find Klimt and Wittgenstein as guests. But Kaspar’s escape to America as the Nazis consolidate their power, and his adjustment to a new homeland, as well as young Waldemar’s affair with Mrs Haven, don’t carry the same emotional charge as Wray’s cosmological flights of fancy. The aspects of the book that should be the most human and relatable don’t resonate as they should. This aside, Wray delivers on other counts in an imaginative and philosophical singularity of a novel.