Time and Again by Jack Finney

A time travel book, where a graphic artist who used to work for an advertising agency is asked to participate in a government program involving time travel. He is supposed to have certain, very rare qualities suitable for going into the past. The method of time travel is self-hypnosis. You just have to be in an environment which hasn’t been changed, behave like you are in the year you are aiming for, use some self-hypnosis, and bing! – you are at that time. You can return by concentrating on modern times. The protagonist goes to New York of the 1880s as there is a mystery to be solved – a crumpled letter which speaks about the burning of world that the letter might have caused. The man manages to get to the past and of course solves the mystery.  

The book is extremely slow moving. There is an actual plot for a short story, but the book is padded with pages and pages and pages of descriptions. Everything in the past is described in minute detail, every person is described in minute detail, every person within 100 meters of the protagonist is named, there are even paragraphs filled with nothing but names. Almost everything in the past is wonderful and quaintly innocent. The protagonist is very unlikeable – he is supposed to have a nice and steady girlfriend, but he seems to flirt with every female he sees and has a very arrogant mentality. And of course, he falls for a nice and beautiful, innocent girl from the past. It is established that changes in the past may change the present – they notice that one person and his family are wiped out, but that is considered as something of no consequence whatsoever and is such a tiny thing it doesn’t matter. And the end of the book degenerates to a rant about modern life – like there were no wars or cruelty in 1880s – weren’t they still butchering native Americans in the west at that time and lynching blacks for the tiniest or even imagined infractions? The writing itself was fairly good, but the plot (and padding in the writing) and the characters were so irritating and stupid, not to mention the ridiculous method of time travel, that the book was a chore to finish.  

400 pp.