Teaser

The year is 1989, and Tom Winter has discovered a tunnel leading back to the 60s. But he is not the only time traveller in town. There’s also a soldier from the future, who will do whatever it takes to ensure the tunnel is not used . . .

Review

Time travel stories are very hard to get right. Generally speaking, I like to divide such stories into two camps. In one camp we have stories that *use* time travel. In this camp we find Doctor Who, which uses time travel as an excuse to tell a completely unrelated story week after week. Another prime example is the granddaddy of time travel stories, HG Wells’ The Time Machine, in which a man travels into the distant future and back without any knock-on side effects. In the other camp we have the slightly more rigorous approach. Stories that are *about* time travel. In this category we find TV shows like Travelers, which had very set rules for time travel and employed them to great effect. We also see Stephen Baxter’s Wellsian sequel The Time Ship, which ties itself into elaborate knots dealing with paradoxes and causality issues.

A Bridge of Years is a book which doesn’t fall neatly into either of those camps. It acknowledges that time travel is a complicated issue, but ultimately remains sidesteps those thorny temporal issues in favour of telling a more intimate story. It helps that the exact nature of time travel in this book is never fully understood by any of the primary characters. There is a tunnel that links different time periods. It goes both ways. That’s all you really need to know.

I’m actually surprised by how much I enjoyed this book. the back cover primed me to expect a romance of time-crossed lovers. That is indeed a part of the book, but mercifully it’s not the focus. It’s just one thread of an incredibly rich tapestry. This is a story that takes so many twists and turns that it’s hard to discuss without giving away the results. There are times when I wish Wilson would tell us what year any given chapter takes place in, but overall it’s quite easy to keep track of things, even as more and more characters are added to the mix.

One element I do think is remarkable is the way A Bridge of Years slowly builds on itself. We know right off the bat that this is a time travel mystery featuring a killer. Then we step sideways to a new character, and those opening chapters have a creeping sense of tension that feels like it came straight out of a Stephen King novel. It’s a palpably horror novel approach that is so different to what I was expecting that I was hooked right away.

And once we get to the stepping between eras, things only get better. Wilson doesn’t circle in on great events. Instead he builds a little corner of old New York for his characters to inhabit. The headline news still has a role to play, but this isn’t a book about changing history of saving lives. even when we get to our characters from the future, there’s no desire to change things (for better or for worse). History has already been written, all we can do is live with the present we’ve been given.

A Bridge of Years is a little different from my usual fare, and a difficult book to discuss with people who haven’t read it, but it’s one I’d thoroughly recommend. One of the best time travel books I’ve happened across, and one that I hope finds a larger audience one day.

Book Stats

• A Standalone Novel
• First Published 1991
• 333 Pages