Most people with a bus pass can tell you
what they were doing or where they were on the 22nd November 1963,
when US president John F Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas, Texas. For those
of later generations, it was the equivalent to the day Diana died or the twin
towers went down. For the record I was sat at home, too young to attend my
sister’s school’s speech night, which had been interrupted by the news.
In the book Jake Epping is given the opportunity
to step back through a “rabbit hole” in time to a particular day in September
1958. The discoverer of the portal, Al Templeton, shares his plan to use it to
go back and prevent the Kennedy assassination, which he is now unable to
complete due to terminal cancer. He wants Jake to take his place and fulfil the
mission.
Naturally dubious, aware of all the pitfalls
of time travel, Jake undertakes some cautious experiments that seem to show
that his small interventions can change the future, discernible when he returns
to the present, but not always for the better. Al convinces him of the
potential benefits for world peace, racial equality and global well-being of
Kennedy’s survival and, having nothing better to do in 2011, Jake agrees to
spend five years living in the “land of ago”.
Cue late fifties and early sixties
nostalgia, lovingly portrayed by one of the best storytellers around - a
reminder of life without mobile phones, computers, terrorism or the internet.
Jake has time to get comfortable and start a new life, but all the time the
clock is ticking down to the fateful date for which he must prepare and before
which he is supposed act, brutally out of character. And then what – stay or
return?
Time travel is tricky and wisely King does
not attempt an explanation, just sets out and sticks to his parameters. On
those terms the concept works and provides a good vehicle for the various
storylines. He writes well, that is a given, but at 850 pages the nostalgia is
a little overdone (about 200 pages) and the heroics a little excessive (I can
see Tom Cruise wanting the part). In the end only the burning desire to find
out how it all ends, both for Jake and for the world, got me through to the
frantic climax.
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