Time and Time Again

As others have said, I always thought of Ben Elton as a comedy writer and I wasn't aware of his books and so was a bit dubious about reading something of a different style, but this book was absolutely amazing and I could not put it down. It'll be playing on my mind for some time.

It's 2024, Hugh Stanton is an ex-SAS special forces soldier turned YouTube sensation, but since his wife and children were killed in a car accident he has felt that life is not worth living. Then his old Cambridge college history professor invites him to spend Christmas with her at Cambridge. Her invitation is not purely altruistic, she wants him to change time by preventing the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, the action which is widely credited as being the catalyst which started the Great War. Sir Isaac Newton had left a letter and a box of materials at Cambridge 300 years earlier addressed to the Master of Trinity to be opened on New Year's Day 2024. Sir Isaac Newton's theory was that time is relative, like a slinky, and every so often the coils touch back on themselves, allowing travel between two times, June 1914 and 2025 are two such points in time. The assassination of the Archduke is a favourite topic for time-travel novels, something that was widely reported at the time, and given added interest because the group had attempted to kill the Archduke several times that day and only succeeded because of a bizarre set of coincidences. I really enjoyed this version, especially the descriptions of pre-War Germany and Austria which coincide with my own imagination of England pre-war. What I really enjoyed were the twists and turns which unfold in the book, I don't want to spoil it for others, suffice it say that Hugh is not the only time traveller and anyone who has watched the film The Butterfly Effect knows that sometimes what we do to change the past can have unintended consequences. It wasn't without its flaws, I felt the female characters were unrealistic and merely plot devices, I also felt Ben Elton got trapped by his own cleverness and didn't know how to end the book in a satisfactory way. But I was gripped from start to finish and would have loved this to be a series.

The premise for this book is so good! However i feel that the actual book is decent, with the first half being well paced but the second half too rushed and becoming confusing. If thought out and with a bit more care taken the book could've been in my top five ever books. An interesting read nonetheless.