Time And Time Again by Ben Elton

If you could go back and change one event in history what would that be?

This is what the Companions Of Chronos have to decide on and the clock is ticking.  According to a letter left by Sir Isaac Newton they have one chance of making a difference, one moment in time where past and present overlap allowing them to step back in time.  Okay, I'm with it so far and it does follow a fairly logical pattern if you accept the theory that past, present and future all exist at the same moment and that time is now a straight line but much more fluid.  However, there is no mention that this one snapshot in the supposed present the traveller(s) could also move in to the future - if the maths is correct for going back in time then it would also be correct for going forward.

Anyway, back to the book.

The Cambridge elite decide that the worst thing that happened was the start of the First World War so they decide that they are going to sabotage the assassination of the Archduke Ferdinand.  But who do they send?  Who better than the all-action Hugh "Guts" Stanton, former alumni at Trinity and tutored by the Master of the college herself.  He has no ties to the present as his wife and children died in a tragic accident, has superb survival skills and also some limited knowledge of languages other than English.  The one thing they don't think through is what the ramifications of changing the path of history would mean.  How will the world reshape itself?  Will things really be better or will they be worse?

The pacing is a little slow in places and on occassion there seems to be a strange dwelling on location descriptions in place of moving the tale forward.  At first I wondered if there was some knowledge, some foreshadowing that the reader should pick up on that Hugh misses in his confusion from being in a largely unknown time.  Sadly, it seems that wasn't the case, a little editing was needed to sort the wheat from the chaff.  Some of the historical detail feels entirely genuine and some rather more fictional but, on the whole, it works.

There is a LOT that goes on in this novel and some of it you will miss until it is explained later in the book.  In fact, it never struck me that as soon as Hugh leaves for 1914 Istanbul then he irrevocably changes the present day so every time the set date and time comes around in the new present a new traveller can be sent over to right any wrongs done by previous travellers.  Of course, this is an obvious result of meddling with time that exists in all states at all moments.  If you try and think about it for too long your brain starts to hurt.

I thoroughly enjoyed this book.  However, if you want a truly exemplary book about Time Travel then I would strongly recommend 11.22.63 by Stephen King - it has the same moral as this book and much of the same set up and premise but is infinitely more accessible.