How to Stop Time

How to Stop Time – Matt Haig

What a great title for a book! I am always drawn to things about time and this novel has a particularly interesting an unusual premise – a central character who ages much more slowly than everyone else. This allows Haig to make observations about time, both in general to all humankind, and specific to his protagonist’s unique way of experiencing the world.

We join Tom’s long life in the present as he moves back to London and becomes a history teacher. He is over 400 years old but only looks around 40. Fittingly, in his interview, the headteacher, Daphne says, “’time, […] is a strange thing, isn’t it?’” She has no idea. The novel includes flashbacks from his childhood and various other points in his life, as he works for William Shakespeare, survives the plague, meets F Scott Fitzgerald and sails with Captain Cook.

He is managed by the Albatross Society (its members, Albas), which is governed by Hendrich, who says he is there to protect them, but makes the members do illegal and immoral acts under the pretense of keeping the secret in order to protect them from scientific testing. He teaches Tom the central rule: “you can love the sight of waterfalls and the smell of old books, but the love of people is off limits”. Essentially, not to get attached to people because it will cause you to lose your mind.

This, however, seems impossible. The character who has touched Tom’s life the most is his first love, Rose, in the 17^th century. Time’s cruelty takes her though, and hundreds of years later he still misses her.  “And she died and I lived and a hole opened up, dark and bottomless, and I fell down and kept falling for centuries”. The book follows him struggling to come to terms with the loss of Rose and other people he has known and loved: “It had made me lonely. And when I say lonely, I mean the kind of loneliness that howls through you like a desert wind. It wasn’t just the loss of people I had known but also the loss of myself. The loss of who I had been when I had been with them.” His daughter, Marion, an Alba too, or so he hopes, is also missing and he has been unable to track her down.

At times the novel is full of melancholic musings. Tom’s condition seems to be more a curse than a blessing. At one point he observes, “it occurred to me that human beings didn’t live beyond a hundred because they simply weren’t up for it. Psychologically, I mean.”  He seems to despair at human beings “making the same mistakes over and over and over and over again”, and that despite the lessons of history, “everything changes and nothing changes”, and “if you live long enough you realise that every proven fact is later disproved and then proven again.” Tom has clear frustrations with the way society has changed for the better and also for the worse and the endless cycle from which he cannot escape. And, no matter how long you live, you can’t escape the human mind! Tom tells one of his students after he catches him with a dodgy crowd late at night, “you realise that you never get away with things. The human mind has its own…prisons.”

Yet, How to Stop Time also contains a great deal of humour and light-hearted observations. For example, as an aside whilst Tom is sat in a doctor’s waiting room, he observes, “one thing that has remained constant, across four centuries, has been the desire for a British person to fill a silence with talk of the weather”.

The novel ends with hope for Tom, reunited with his daughter and pursuing a new relationship with a fellow teacher. Despite his vast knowledge of the past, he is the same position as everyone else when it comes to the future: “That is the whole thing with the future. You don’t know. At some point you have to accept that you don’t know. You have to stop flicking ahead and just concentrate on the page you are on.” Not quite stopping time, but the closest it seems a human being can get, along with the suspension of reality brought by the act of reading itself.