How to Stop Time by Matt Haig

I don't have any particularly deep thoughts to share about How to Stop Time (and some might say I haven't had any deep thoughts about any of the books I've read and reviewed so far for this blog, but that is another thing altogether…), but the one thing I do have to say is that I really enjoyed it and would definitely recommend it to anyone who wanted a light, quick, easy, well written and engaging read.

Our hero is Tom Hazard, a 41-year-old Englishman who is just about to start a new job as a history teacher at a London secondary school. The only trouble is that Tom Hazard isn’t his real name – well, not his full name, anyway –  he’s not 41 and he’s not really English. Because Tom is over 400 years old, comes from French aristocratic stock and suffers from a rare disease called anageria, which radically slows down the aging process.

The idea of the disease is a lovely conceit because it allows Matt Haig to have Tom participate in the momentous events as well as the small events that make up the warp and weft of history. He has sailed with Captain Cook, has chatted over cocktails with  F Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald in Paris and played the lute at the Globe Theatre while Shakespeare and his company performed.  All these events are entertaining in their own right and contribute to the narrative, but they are also punctuation to the larger story of Tom struggling to keep his secret and to find his place in a world where he has no place because he is an anomaly and sometimes a pariah.

Tom is not the only one with his condition and he is a somewhat reluctant member of the Albatross Society, an organization created to protect fellow sufferers of anageria and to support them through their long lives with new identities when it becomes obvious to others that they are not aging. The trouble is the society has rules that Tom chafes against, and the first rule is ‘Don’t Fall in Love’, so it’s pretty obvious what will happen and Matt Haig doesn’t disappoint in his handling of how that happens and its consequences. The tragedy for Tom is that the last time he fell in love at the end of the 16^th century it did not end well so he is naturally gun shy about the implications of any new relationship. Additionally, Tom is seeking for the daughter that was born to his first love, a daughter called Marion who is just like him.

I really liked the way Matt Haig weaves the modern day and historical narratives together, so that we alternate following Tom’s quest to find Marion and a potential new relationship in modern times, with his adventures in London, Paris and Tahiti in years gone by. This means that the timeline jumps around from the present day to the 16^th century, the 19^th century and back to the present within a few chapters, but I appreciated that it is always clear where you are (the chapters are also clearly and handily date stamped!), but more importantly it is always clear what each of these time changes is contributing to the narrative. It would be easy for the author to have thought, ‘I know, wouldn’t it be cool to put Tom in Paris in time to chat about The Great Gatsby with F Scott Fitzgerald’, but there is actually a reason for putting him in that timeline that pays off within the wider story.

I would say that I did see one of the twists in the story coming a mile away, or at least I saw half the twist, but it didn’t spoil my enjoyment of the whole and Matt Haig keeps things rattling on at a good pace without giving the reader the feeling that he’s trying to push things too fast.

In his interview for the history teacher’s job, Tom is asked how he would make history come alive. He says “History isn’t something you need to bring to life. History already is alive. We are history….. It’s just making them realise that everything they say and do and see is only what they say and do and see because of what has gone before.”

I think that is actually one of the pleasures of How to Stop Time. It is a great entertaining read, but in following Tom’s story, I found myself thinking about history, about the way time moves and our place in it, about how it builds on times before and reinvents it and how it can feel both stationary and moving at an incredible rate given how fleeting life is in the scale of things. Matt Haig has taken that thought and extrapolated it into a story where life is not fleeting, but everyday living is – and oh goodness, look at that, a deep thought crept in after all when I wasn’t looking – pesky little blighters.

How to Stop Time was first published in 2018 and my copy was published by Harper Avenue.