Book review: How to Stop Time

How to Stop Time
By Matt Haig
(Published in Great Britain by Canon Gate, In Canada: 2018 from HarperAvenue)

Whenever I travel to the English-speaking world, I always check out the bestseller lists and the bookstores. My favourite place to travel (and to find books) is London. I was there this summer and I discovered a new author – Matt Haig.
He’s got a new book out in the United Kingdom called How to Stop Time. It’s not being released in Canada until next February, but I highly recommend it.
I was stopped short by the title. Who hasn’t wished they could stop time? I certainly have. I wish it almost every day when I’m plowed under by deadlines and emails I have to return and tasks I have to complete. I also wish it whenever I am struck by happiness and how things are good in the moment. Could things just stay like this forever?
So, based on the title, I had to buy this book. I’m glad I did. It’s about a man who ages slowly – very slowly. The book opens like this: “I am old. That is the first thing to tell you. The thing you are least likely to believe. If you saw me you would probably think I was about forty, but you would be very wrong. I am old – old in the way that a tree, or a quahog clam, or a Renaissance painting is old. To give you an idea: I was born well over four hundred years ago on the third of March 1581, in my parents’ room, on the third floor of a small French chateau that used to be my home.”
So it’s a fun book, based on a fanciful idea, that allows the author to play with a storyline that spans several centuries and a narrator that has seen it all. It’s also a love story, although the narrator’s love died in the time of Shakespeare. But they had a daughter, a daughter like him, who ages slowly, and who is probably still alive. They’ve lost each other, but his quest to find her is the heart of this story.
Haig is an interesting writer. He’s down to Earth and tells a quick, catchy story, but at the same time, he quotes Sartre and Montaigne and includes Shakespeare and F. Scott Fitzgerald as bit players in his novel to magical effect.
tracy.sherlock@gmail.com