Time and Time Again

Ben Elton books have never really appealed to me - I remember trying one many years ago loosely based on the Big Brother concept and it failed to grip me, I was therefore surprised by the urgent need I had to read Time and Time Again, his latest novel, after reading its dust jacket in my local Sainsbury's store.

It immediately intrigued me as the story talks about what would happen if you had one chance to go back and change history, which single event would you alter to make the world a better place. The story's hero has exactly that chance when he travels back to June 1914 just weeks before the events that would trigger the outbreak of World War I.

The story begins in 2024 where Army captain Hugh Stanton is asked to visit his old Cambridge history professor, having recently lost his wife and children he is alone and grieving and unprepared for the task his old friend will ask of him.

The story jumps back and forth a bit at the start between Hugh in Constantinople in 1914 and his preparation for his journey in 2024 and it is immediately gripping and engaging. We are led carefully to the point where through great writing we understand Hugh's mission and the events he must stop in order to change the world.

I must be honest I am not brilliant at World War I history or the politics which caused it and I felt I learned a great deal from reading this book as it drove me to the Internet to correlate the fiction I was reading with the facts and I genuinely feel I came away more informed and aware than when I began. The countries and places the book takes us to are really atmospheric and painted in beautiful writing by Elton, Turkey, Berlin, London, the Orient Express in its hey day.

There were brilliant thought provoking moments as well that made me really think like when Hugh meets a young Irish suffragette just after completing the first part of his mission. He tells her he is sure the vote for women will happen soon but he realises that the driver for the rise in support for women's votes is the very war he has potentially just stopped. Suddenly as a reader my mind began spinning, how would this affect women the world over, just how big an impact can one small act have.

It is a wonderful book, I have read some reviews saying Stephen King wrote a similar book and did so better but having not had that to contrast against I can't say I felt disappointed or at all like this book was lacking. It has also been compared to Life After Life by Kate Atkinson but I felt it was more about the personal journey of the main character whereas Elton had written more about the impact upon humanity as a whole.

I loved the ending, it was brilliant the way it twisted and suddenly made clear that assumptions I'd made as a reader from the books outset were actually untrue and it was a much more complex ending than I'd anticipated. It was an intelligent and clever ending and left me unable to quite get this book out of my head.

One of the books that appealed to me from the shelf and didn't let me down once I delved in it was hugely satisfying and enjoyable.