‘Have you ever heard the saying that time is a construct?” “Yes, of course.”
“Well, what if it isn’t just a construct? What if we constructed it?”
Time travel is a tricky concept for authors to tackle, but done well, as in recent novels such as like Kaliane Bradley’s The Ministry of Time and Solvej Balle’s On The Calculation of Volume, it’s a potent means to explore ideas and history. Most of us imagine ourselves in faraway times, meeting our ancestors, or journeying back through our lifetime and changing our most regretful decisions. In her debut novel, US writer Hayley Gelfuso presents a world in which a select few do hold this power.
The Book of Lost Hours explores generations of two families, who include members of clandestine international spy groups. These spies use specially made pocket watches to enter a supernatural library, a space out of time, where memories of the dead are held in books. The spies hold the power to rifle through the books for information and the ability to change what is held as fact by destroying key memories.
The story begins in 1938 as 11-year-old Lisavet Levy escapes the terror of Kristallnacht by slipping into the time library. She lives inside the library and learns its ways, eventually opening the memories and travelling into them, moving through the past and learning history.
It also follows another timeline in 1965, where teenage Amelia is approached by a CIA agent at her uncle’s funeral. The agent informs her that her late uncle and guardian was a time agent for the CIA and Amelia is to play a key part in operations during their covert war with Russia over the time library. Moira, the CIA agent, takes Amelia home and the two of them skirt around Moira’s villainous boss, Jack. The story unfolds, alternating between the 60s and the time library. We learn about Moira’s past, Amelia’s uncle Ernest’s career and Jack’s clumsy American diplomacy, as they all try to make sense of Lisavet and her revolutionary deeds in the time library.
It is a lot to keep track of. Layers of time, and of the families, are piled atop each other like stacks of papers on a messy desk. It is difficult at first to make sense of what’s happening; which characters we should pay attention to. Gelfuso may be trying to wrangle too much. While the time library sequences are whimsical and poetic, moments with Moira and her workplace bring to mind more procedural TV shows like The X-Files. The different tones are jarring and the changes in setting and vibe mean that the reader is left with no time to sink into the atmosphere or connect with the characters.
Other stories have done romance and the wiping of memory well, such as the film Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, and Gelfuso has the same great themes at the base of this novel, but the strands are too entangled and the execution is wanting. Still, it is an ambitious and interesting first novel, with some clever twists and reveals, and there is a sweet “love you in every lifetime”-style romance.
The Book of Lost Hours, by Hayley Gelfuso (Allen & Unwin, $37.99), is out now.
