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For the first 100 pages of this book, I
thought I was going to give it up, but I persisted and was happy I
did: it is a pretty enjoyable time travel novel.
Josh Winkler is a middle-aged man who lives in
Euclid Heights, Illinois. He is a sympathetic loser, a passable
artist who was lucky enough to marry
Flo, a pediatrician with her feet on the ground. They have a
thirteen-year-old
daughter, Penny, who, to her father's
hidden disappointment, seems more interested in medicine than in
art. A past drama is the cause of the
unlikely couple: each lost a
brother in the same drowning accident: Flo's
brother died, while Josh brother's Kurt
sustained important brain damage that left him a different
person.
Josh is quite content with his rather idle
life, when one day, while bicycling on a neighboring path,
a strange physical impression and the disappearance of a dog make
him wonder. A few days later, during a storm, a similar experience
occurs that make him realize he went into the recent past. Astonished by
these
experiences, Josh tells his
daughter and wife, causing
the first to spread the news around and the second to suspect
that he has a
brain tumor.
Soon, a girl appears mysteriously, claiming to belong in
1908. While Josh becomes obsessed with time travel, his wife is
more and more weary of what she came to
believe is a scam. But soon, these strange
events will involve the Winkler family, forcing Josh to
meddle with the past...
As I said at the beginning, the first hundred
pages (which unfortunately represent more than a third of the novel)
are slow-going. The narrator remembers
uneventful childhood anecdotes and his
present is not much exciting either. Of course, most scenes will
find a relevance as the story unfolds, but the reader doesn't know
that at the beginning. Then, after 100 pages or so, the story picks
up and the reader becomes engrossed in an exciting adventure
involving time travel and all its corollaries. Almost everything
falls into place in the end.
This book presents two originalities compared
to other time travel books: unlike in other novels where they know
exactly what to do to achieve the precise result they want, here the
time travelers are lost and rather clueless about what they should
do, which seems more logical. Also, the story doesn't unfold as
you're made to expect in the beginning. In most time travel stories,
changing the past often results in a single isolated change (the
precise desired change) in the future and this always bothered me.
Charles Dickinson thought about a lot of the implications of time
travel (not all, of course, or he couldn't have written his novel),
and this effort should be saluted. I liked
the way these time travel reflections are brought up by various
characters.
Another letdown of the novel is
the last chapter. It ends so suddenly that I had to check if two
pages weren't stuck together and if in fact
another chapter was awaiting
me.
During the reading of the book, I wanted to
rate it 2 and at other times I thought it deserved a 4. I guess it
will be a 3! The author had great ideas but the novel
seems like a draft that needs both editing and completing:
a very good draft, but still a draft ... A Shortcut in Time
would made an excellent movie.
Rating: 
© Discussing Books, 02/24/2003
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Critiques
