The Thumbnail Book Reviews
by John Q McDonald --- 29 August 2010
by Richard Matheson
We're a species given to dwelling on the past. It is much easier to know and more reliable than the future, or even the present. As life grows ever faster and the things we relied upon yesterday become obsolete today, we become more reliant on the things we remember. We spend a lot of time just commemorating the events of our past. And, in times of stress or strain, we turn also to the past for some security. It's almost pathological. So, what if wishing it could make it so? What if we could meditate on that place in the past where we think we would be happier and then suddenly find ourselves there? That's the basic idea behind this romantic sci-fi time-travel novel. Richard Collier, a man suffering from a brain tumor, decides he isn't going to die at home, with his family. On the flip of a coin, he finds himself at the Hotel del Coronado, a wedding-cake structure on the coast near San Diego. The hotel was built back in the late 19th century, and, viewing some of the historical exhibits there, Collier soon falls in love with the photo of a beautiful and famous actress from 1896. In the first hundred pages of this book, our protagonist researches Elise McKenna's life (she does seem to be based upon a real popular actress of that era), and researches the nature of time and time-travel. Within days, he masters a technique of basically meditating yourself back in time. There are enormous holes in this idea, of course, as there are in most time-travel scenarios (and this whole story is also very similar to Jack Finney's Time and Again). Set the holes aside, and we find Mr. Collier in 1896, and soon walking arm-in-arm with Miss McKenna on the littered beaches of Coronado. It is an interesting idea, that wishing can make it so. And the author wraps the tale in our skepticism by adding notes by Collier's brother. In the end even the romantic part of the story, life on the beach more than a century ago, isn't terribly convincing. Matheson evokes the time fairly well, but that Richard and Elise fall in love in a matter of hours in a tightly constricted Victorian culture stretches plausibility perhaps even more than the time travel itself. The book is an awkward entertainment, intriguing in idea, but a bit clunky in follow-through.
(The book was originally published as Bid Time Return and made into the movie Somewhere in Time in 1980. Matheson has been a successful writer for both the large and small screen, including other movies and several episodes of The Twilight Zone. Some of his works have become classics of the genre.)