The Psychology of Time Travel by Kate Mascarenhas

Yes, my birthday has just passed so, as is now a routine (see elsewhere), my lover¹ gifted me a novel about time travel.

This one is from 2018 (I think), and though it is neatly constructed, engaging and fun in ways that something like this needs to be, I felt (without any textual or extra-textual evidence) that this could have been more… more playful, more interesting and I left the book feeling like it had been damped down, repressed – a little – by an editor or agent or (even) authorial voice that should have been ignored: this could have been a great time travel novel. Instead it is merely a good one.

Basically, I’m going to have to talk about the appendices. The existence of the appendices shows an attention to detail and wider, complex unique world building that I would have loved to be deeper in… The appendices promise greatness. Instead, they are just appendices…

But how do I talk about the appendices without mentioning the content/context of the wider novel? Christ, I don’t know. I don’t know. I just don’t know. Oh no.

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In the 1960s, a group of four women invent time travel. One of them is an aristo cunt bitch (for want of a better phrase, but that seems like all the novel allows?) with absolutely no redeeming features (or complex humanity, you could argue, but nothing about Margaret feels unbelievable tbh so it’s less a literary failing than a literary choice?) who becomes the (sort of?) villain of the entire novel as the leader of the subsequent time travel institution, while the other three are bland and lacking in characteristic distinction although – except for one who doesn’t really seem to exist much at all – there is narrative distinction, at least. (As in different things happen to them.)

It looks like it will be gang of four forever until one of them has a time travel induced psychiatric breakdown in the midst of a stuffy BBC interview, and is kicked out of the gang forever, just before the massive military industrial complex grants come in and Mascarenhas’ version of time travel becomes a near permanent feature of this fictional world, all of it happening under the auspices of the institution run by the woman of the four who’s a nob.

We (the reader) gets, then, an alternative latter half of the twentieth century, one where a permanent building dedicated to constant time travel exists in the City of London, a time travel tied to time travel devices:

In the time travel of this novel, one may only time travel as far back or forward as the time machine exists exists exists.

The time machine can be moved while people are inside it, and people can travel through it to and from different times and in different directions simultaneously, but if things have gone in, they have to come out

There’s no crappy divergent timelines, there’s no rewriting the past, there’s just blunt commerce – i.e. selling technology and foodstuffs from the future to the people of today and selling plants and animals otherwise made extinct back to the people in the future.

The time travel is basically used for exchange, of goods and services, but also information: economic information, political information, scientific information, cultural information (there is an interesting section where a character visits an art exhibition by a conceptual artist who incorporates time travel into all her pieces), judicial information and – most importantly to the novel and its characters – personal familial/romantic information.

No one can change the past (or even a future when/where there exists knowledge of what will happen), and with foreknowledge (arguably) proving the existence of fate, justice becomes swift and violent (i.e. if we know we’re going to execute someone for something then we’re gonna have to execute them 🤷‍♂️) and the time travellers all, slowly, become emotionally and ethically detached from their own actions, their own deaths (which they sometimes watch, and which never preclude them experiencing later events (because a younger version of them (a “green-[me/you/she/he/them/us]” is the term used by the time travellers (and “silver-[pronoun]” for older)) can always time travel to see it) as well as the deaths of their friends, family and – especially – strangers.

The time travelers, then, become cruel and cliquey, most only spending time with other time travellers (be those time travellers from the past, the future or their own time), with communal time traveller halls of residence in the central London building where they mostly all live and stay, often hanging out with their past and future selves, as well as their colleagues.

Anyway, basically all of the time travellers become like the woman in charge… I.e., dickheads.

Bizarre, violent, and cruel hazing rituals become normalised, and anyone who isn’t 100% on board is immediately fired. When you have several centuries of potential employees to recruit from, the labour pool is very very deep.

–///–

Mascarenhas keeps the action in the years between the machine’s invention and 2018ish (when the novel was published, I think), and tho characters do travel into the future, the reader is never taken with them. That no one can travel beyond the machines’ existences either way means there’s nothing earlier than the 1960s, either.

–///–

So, ya, that’s the setting: the plot is that an old lady with bodily evidence of time travel is found dead, full of bullets, in the locked-from-the-inside boiler room of a museum in 2018, and various outsiders attempt to discover – because it’s being hushed up by the time travel institution – a) which of the four women who invented time travel has been killed, b) how she was killed in a locked room and c) who killed her. (Initially they’re trying to figure out “why”, but it’s self explanatory as soon as the identity is established because it’s the prick boss and everyone who ever met her fucking hated her.

–///–

The Psychology of Time Travel, then, is about the effects on the mind and the consciousness and the conscience of irrevocable knowledge of the future, and Mascarenhas plays this relatively straight, though does make absolutely everyone who is a career time traveller a massive bell-end (or someone who pretends to be a massive bell-end like 90% of the time even if they’re secretly not a massive bell-end sometimes, but – in fiction as in life – a person’s motivations matter far far far less than their actions (that’s why that’s why that’s why-)))))))))

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Sorry –

the novel has, as an appendix, like ten different psychosomatic texts produced within the world of the novel to be given out to time travellers to assess/monitor their psychiatric health as well as their ethical perspectives while they work.

As an appendix, it adds nothing to the plot, and doesn’t bolster the atmosphere of a narrative experience now over…. however had these been scattered through the text – as I imagine they maybe were designed to be??? – then I feel the book would really have been elevated and made more complex.

That the text has access to this wealth of non-standard fictional world-building material but failed to use it within its main body is somewhat disappointing.

But that’s it, tho, lol, that’s my gripe… That the text wasn’t quite complex and postmodern enough. But the book is, arguably, right (?), because that stuff is there. But an appendix, rather than an aside, is less invasive, less central, less potent. Isn’t it? Yeah?

If the appendices had been scattered in the text, I woulda loved it (or even if they’d been right at the beginning, like, as a barrier to the dull reader intimidated by non-standard prose), but as it were I merely liked it a lot. Also there were too many characters.

Thank you!

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^{1. in response to a recent post where I referred to my lover as “an academic”, I’ve been asked to clarify instead that she “works as” an academic and isn’t merely limited and defined by the mode in which she predominantly exchanges labour for money. Which is fair enough imo. (((And yes, that’s right I do still know how to do footnotes and the process hasn’t been lost. But I’m unlikely to do more as the method is slow and annoying, now that I only ever make these posts on my phone (I’m too depressed to use my desk lol whoops). And I’ve also typed this footnote before I’ve done that annoying “turn it into a footnote” process, so I’m really trusting my future (tomorrow) self to do this. And why should one trust a silver-self??}?)))↩ –