How to Stop Time

by Matt Haig

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SHORTLISTED FOR THE BRITISH BOOK AWARDS FICTION BOOK OF THE YEAR

HOW MANY LIFETIMES DOES IT TAKE TO LEARN HOW TO LIVE?

Tom Hazard has a dangerous secret. He may look like an ordinary 41-year-old history teacher, but he's been alive for centuries. From Elizabethan England to Jazz-Age Paris, from New York to the South Seas, Tom has seen it all. As long as he keeps changing his identity he can keep one step ahead of his past - and stay alive. The only thing he must not do is fall in love . . .

• ISBN10: 1782118640
• ISBN13: 9781782118640
• Publish Date: 14 December 2017 (first published 6 July 2017)
• Publish Status: Out of Print
• Out of Print: 11 August 2022
• Publish Country: GB
• Imprint: Canongate Books
• Edition: Main
• Format: Paperback (B-Format (198x129 mm))
• Pages: 336
• Language: English

Reviews

[brdsk]

A flower ruined, is how this book feels.
Goodbye, little flower.

[wcs53]

I really enjoyed this one, which could be described as a different kind of time-travel story. The story centres around Tom Hazard, living in the 21st century, but born in 1581. He has a condition in which he ages slowly. The drawback of this is that he has to move every 8 years or so, in case people get suspicious. The book flits back between present day and different time periods in his life. Each of these time periods reveal something else about his life, his hopes, his fears, his loves, and the people he has lost over the years. I won’t give anything else away, and it is definitely one worth reading.

[brokentune]

“The longer you live, the harder it becomes. To grab them. Each little moment as it arrives. To be living in something other than the past or the future. To be actually here.
Forever, Emily Dickinson said, is composed of nows. But how do you inhabit the now you are in? How do you stop the ghosts of all the other nows from getting in? How, in short, do you live?”

You know when sometimes it feels like a book chooses you rather than the other way around? Apparently, the two books I picked up while dazed with exhaustion at Heathrow last month did exactly that. I knew little about either of them and both turned out to provide exactly the kind of world-critical comfort I needed.

And, yes, I tend to not turn to sweet or light reads for comfort. Never have, really.

Anyway, How to Stop Time tells the story of Tom who was born in 1581 and "suffers" from a rare condition that makes him age very, very slowly. So, he lives through the centuries, falls in love, looses his loved ones, sees the world change, and sees the world remain the same.

"I go on the BBC and Guardian websites. I read a couple of news articles about fracturing US and Chinese relations. Everyone in the comments section is predicting the apocalypse. This is the chief comfort of being four hundred and thirty-nine years old. You understand quite completely that the main lesson of history is: humans don't learn from history."

Tom really suffers with this condition. He finds it hard to invest his life in people that he knows will die so long before him. He also finds it hard to live in one place, because his condition means that he is looked up with suspicion by the people around him, at best. At worst, he and his loved ones are persecuted.

“Human beings, as a rule, simply don't accept things that don't fit their worldview.”

He lives through the plague and the witch hunts and several other catastrophes. He discovers new worlds with Captain Cook and sees them go to seed.

“And yet we had done what so often happened in the proud history of geographic discovery. We had found paradise. And then we had set it on fire.”

I really enjoyed the book. The story struck a balance between bildungsroman as we watch Tom grow and learn about who he is and about his place in the world, mystery as we follow Tom's quest to find his daughter, thriller as watch Tom get caught up in a dubious organisation, and social criticism. I really felt for Tom as he, despise his wisdom of age, struggled to deal with each moment of new-ness in this world.

“As far as I can see, this is a problem with living in the twenty-first century. Many of us have every material thing we need, so the job of marketing is now to tie the economy to our emotions, to make us feel like we need more by making us want things we never needed before. We are made to feel poor on thirty thousand pounds a year. To feel poorly travelled if we have been to only ten other countries. To feel too old if we have a wrinkle. To feel ugly if we aren’t photoshopped and filtered. No one I knew in the 1600s wanted to find their inner billionaire. They just wanted to live to see adolescence and avoid body lice.”

What struck me most about the book, tho, was that Haig inserted snippets of positivity into the story. Despite the general observation that humanity is doomed to forever repeat itself because it does not take lessons from the past, there is also some hope:

“Whenever I see someone reading a book, especially if it is someone I don't expect, I feel civilisation has become a little safer.”

[jamiereadthis]

A few chapters in, I had to look up the genre to see if I had missed something and this was YA. Apparently it’s not, but it sure feels like it’s aimed at someone much younger than me. I ran out of eyerolls after a couple of chapters of implausible things. (Would you rather… have Will Shakespeare defend you from bullies, or mourn for four celibate centuries for your first love?)

I don’t think life works that way, or that history would be so convenient. A good concept, for sure, but the execution could stand a punch-up.

[luddite]

Poignant, well-written, neat prose in that it's reflective and contemplative without being a drone.

This book is going to stay with me for a while because of how it unpacks questions of time, uncertainty, and living with fear and loss.

Good chunks of profundity and beautifully written.

"He who fears he shall suffer, already suffers what he fears." (Montaigne)