How to Stop Time, by Matt Haig
This book is about Tom Hazard, a man afflicted with an unusual condition - he ages at a much slower rate than the rest of humanity. So although he looks about 40, he is actually over 400 years old. While there are undeniably perks to this condition (having met both Shakespeare and Charlie Chaplin, for instance), after four centuries Tom is feeling the weight of it. He is overwhelmed by his past, and in the present he lives in fear of discovery, changing his identity regularly, and trying not to get too attached to any particular place - or person.
One thing I've found Matt Haig to be very good at is creating an exciting concept. He has such good original ideas, ideas that he can have a lot of fun with, build some good stories and good characters out of, and explore the deeper and more philosophical aspects of too. And 'How to Stop Time' fitted this Matt Haig style absolutely perfectly. The concept of aging really slowly, centred around this character who's been alive for four-hundred-odd years and just wants a normal life, was really cool.
But for a book whose central idea and blurb really excited me, I have to say I was a little bit underwhelmed. This isn't to say it was a bad book - it wasn't! But I had really high hopes, and for me it just missed the mark.
This might be because of the philosophy in it. The philosophy itself wasn't the problem - there were actually some really interesting issues to unpack, born out of the concept. Questions like whether it's better for Tom to love someone and inevitably lose them, or never to let himself love at all. Questions about whether humanity has really changed all that much in 400 years, or whether history is doomed to repeat itself. Questions about the purpose of being alive, about the significance of family, about mental health.
This was all fascinating stuff, and the novel certainly would have been bereft without it, but I just felt that sometimes it was a bit too much in one go. There were often quite long passages of Tom just thinking through these issues, or else it would surface in his dialogue - it was simply in his nature as a character to be very contemplative like this - and for me it occasionally got a bit in the way of the narrative, and was in danger of trying to sound profound, and coming across as a bit contrived.
The second thing I didn't love was the idea of Tom being a history teacher. Again, there was nothing inherently wrong with this (although - teaching history is a questionable choice for a character who finds the past so painful...), there was just something about the way it was done that I didn't like so much. The amount of teaching time Tom spent drifting off into his memories irked me a bit (but that's the student in me coming through - maybe I should be more forgiving to a guy who's got 400 years' worth of memories weighing on his mind!). And I think maybe Haig could have made a bit more of the teaching storyline, actually. There's a lot of story potential in teaching, and it was hinted at in a tiny subplot where Tom's teaching inspires one student to get back on the right life path - that could have made a whole novel in itself, but did it slightly slip under the rug?
I completely understand why that happened: it's because there were so many other storylines Haig was weaving together. We readers were following Tom's history-teaching narrative in the present day, his complicated dealings with his boss Hendrich, his romance in Elizabethan England, his friendship with Omai in Tahiti in the 18th century, his life as a bar pianist in 1920s Paris... Fleshing out all of these to their maximum potential would have been a mammoth task, and the book would have ended up equally mammoth (Charles Dickens springs to mind...). Haig did a very commendable job of including all this exciting variety and still managing to make it all hang together, but I can't decide whether there was in fact a bit too much breadth. I would have liked to see more depth in the relationships, more time spent developing these characters, so that each of the narrative threads meant a bit more. It's one of the perils of writing a book that has a time-span of centuries, I guess.
So to conclude, my opinion is that the balance wasn't quite right. I would have preferred a bit less of the deep philosophy, and would have liked to see this depth channelled into the characters and the narratives instead. I think a lot of the philosophical themes would have surfaced and been apparent anyway, without needing to be included explicitly in Tom's thoughts and in the dialogue - and this might even have helped to make the speech a bit more natural. Better to underdo this than to underdo the depth of the narrative, I think.
But although it wasn't quite my cup of tea, there were still plenty of things to like about this book. Don't be put off by my personal preference! It was a great entertaining concept, a wild and pacey ride with lots of narrative strands in lots of different historical settings, and there were some thought-provoking themes woven into the fun. So if you like a bit of history, a bit of romance, and occasionally some very deep thought, you might just like it more than I did.