On Time and the Novel

A few weeks ago, all the clocks stopped working at my place. The one by my bedside was losing twenty minutes a day; the one in the kitchen the same; my wristwatch lost a bit more every time I looked at it, and my pocket watch was half an hour out.The clocks recovered with new batteries, and a trip to the watchmaker replaced another battery, but the wristwatch had to be cleaned and reset and has been ‘monitored’: I’m told it has lost no time in three days, and now can come home. The jeweller informed me that hand wound watches have to be calibrated, as a little grit can disturb them: watchmaking is a science, she said.

            There's been a project running around Facebook lately that asks people to list their 10 most influential novels. Some interpret this broadly and list their most influential books; some include children’s books, and some non-fiction. I tried to stick to novels, but included children’s books, like The Eagle of the Ninth.

            My boss, Philip Harvey, is a deeply intuitive thinker who as he lists his books includes an exegesis based on the basic principles of each type of book, although he claims to have no system for how to read novels. Ulysses is ‘the greatest comic novel in English’ and Finnegan’s Wake ‘the most terrifying verbal object in world literature’ and on his separate list of 10 children’s novels, The Tailor of Gloucester, ‘a story of the actions of grace.’

            When I looked at my list and tried to make sense of it, I thought that a lot of my most influential novels had to do with time. The Magic Mountain tells us on its first page that it deals with the passage of time and ‘the pastness of the past.’ Proust’s volumes state time as their theme in the title. I might be in search of lost time myself because I show such a preference for historical fiction. Memoirs of Hadrian is set in the Roman Empire; The Nutmeg of Consolation during the Napoleonic era. A Study in Scarlet paints a particular view of Victorian England. I think the pastness of the past appeals to me; I find it more interesting than the future, which is unknown, but which the past illuminates.

            The action of The Magic Mountain comprises seven years. While the main character is sunk in every kind of philosophical debate, artistic manifestation, health concern and family complication, the external world is keeping its own time, so that Hans Castorp suddenly finds himself drafted into the army as WWI breaks out, where all the seven years’ efforts to keep him alive may very possibly come to nothing. It strikes me that this is how time deals with us. We are so deeply engaged with our own lives, and we have to wake up sometimes and look around at what the world has been doing in our absence.

            Even the children’s books The Princess and the Goblin and The Princess and Curdie, although they are fantasies with a religious subtext, show this inexorable passage of time: for all the magical and mystical achievements of the heroes, the great city falls in the end, due to the carelessness of its people, and even its name is lost to history.

            History is what we are living today. And it’s good to remember the name of our city. I’m going to collect my watch, and watch it keep time, and watch time pass.