Writing in Time

I’ve been thinking a lot about time, recently. It all started with having a cold. With nothing to do but try and throw it off, and nowhere to go but the few steps from my bed to the kettle and back again, I got down to some serious reading – or rather, re-reading. The book was Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain, which, as anyone who has read it will know, is ideally suited for the sick-room. Set in a Swiss sanatorium on the eve of the First World War, it combines a broad, philosophical view of life (and death) with a wonderfully gossipy style. Even though, on the face of it, not a great deal happens – beyond the daily routines of meals (five a day!) and rest-cures – the novel is packed with incident. As character follows chapter, one finds oneself burning to know whether the stoical Joachim Ziemssen will pluck up the courage to speak to the flirtatious Marusja, or when – if ever – Hans Castorp will consummate his passion for the beautiful Clavdia Chauchat.

Interwoven with these and other absorbing concerns, are passages like this:

What is time? A mystery, a figment – and all-powerful. It conditions the exterior world, it is motion married to and mingled with the existence of bodies in space, and with the motion of these. Would there be no time if there were no motion? No motion if no time? We fondly ask. Is time a function of space? Or space of time? Or are they identical? Echo answers. Time is functional, it can be referred to as action; we say a thing is “brought about” by time. What sort of thing? Change! Now is not then, here not there, for between them lies motion. But the motion by which one measures time is circular, is in a closed circle; and might equally well be described as rest, as cessation of movement – for the there repeats itself constantly in the here, the past in the present…

Published in 1924, The Magic Mountain was of course part of a wider debate about the nature of Time, set in motion by the publication of Einstein’s Theory of Relativity in 1920. Philosophers such as Henri Bergson and William James examined ideas about Time, Duration and Simultaneity in successive works during the years that followed – ideas that found their way not only into Mann’s novel, but into Proust’s A la Recherche du Temps Perdu (1922), Joyce’s Ulysses (1922) and Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway (1925), to say nothing of Wyndham Lewis’s magnificently reactionary satire The Childermass (1928). It is surely no accident that all these works, and others no less concerned with ‘lost time’, such as Eliot’s The Wasteland (1922), should have been published in the aftermath of the most destructive war in history, which had shattered notions of time as an unbroken continuum, as it had so much else.

Whether, as in Joyce’s famous work – or indeed Woolf’s – the action takes place within a single day, or (as in The Magic Mountain), concerns the events of seven years, the intention is the same: to portray time as both reality and illusion. For while Leopold Bloom’s wanderings around Dublin, or Clarissa Dalloway’s around London, certainly appear to take place in ‘real’ time, the actual time it takes to read about them is much longer. Even the fastest reader (and I count myself as one) might find it a tall order to get through Ulysses in a single day, and, since much of the pleasure of the novel lies in its loving depiction of the inconsequential, one would lose much by attempting to do so. Time, in all these works, is seen as a fluid entity, in which present events are intermingled with those of the past, so that one is not always sure which is uppermost. Quite small occurrences occupy pages of description, whilst others, apparently more significant, are skimmed over.

In this, of course, these great Modernist writers are mimicking the way time ‘feels’ in real life – that is, both short and long; both ‘endless’, as in one’s memories of childhood summers, and (looking back from the perspective of middle-age) as if it were over in a flash. Time, as anyone knows who has ever waited for a delayed train, or a piece of unpleasant news, can move with leaden feet; or it can dash by, in a twinkling, when one is having fun. ‘Can it really be that time already?’ one asks, at the end of an enjoyable evening with friends, which seems to have flown past; but ‘surely it can’t still be four o’clock?’ one groans, when longing for the working day to end.

All these aspects of time have to be considered in writing a novel – especially when, as is the case with my most recently completed work, Variable Stars, time and its workings are so central to the story. The accurate measurement of time is of course of crucial importance in astronomy, and – since my three main characters are astronomers – it was essential to convey this. In the eighteenth century, which is when the novel is set, time measurement was not yet standardised, although – as anyone who has read about John Harrison’s quest to measure longitude will know – the necessity of doing so was fast becoming apparent. The fact that the light from the stars my astronomers spent their lives studying had taken hundreds, if not thousands of years to reach them, was another mind-boggling concept I had to contend with.

The importance of time in relation to the creation and performance of music, was something else I had to consider in writing Variable Stars, since two of my characters are not only astronomers, but musicians. This seemed of particular significance in an age before sound recording meant that what had once been ephemeral could be experienced over and over again, sometimes decades after the original recording. In the eighteenth century, music took place entirely in the here and now – as it still does, of course, when one attends a ‘live’ performance. But it still seemed worth making the point that music and time are inseparable. Music, you might say, is a way of dramatising time.

As well as trying to show the scientific, and artistic, applications of time, I also had to contend with more practical considerations, in telling my story. My central character, Caroline Herschel, was extraordinary not only because she distinguished herself in the field of science, at a time when very few women were permitted to do so, but because she lived to be ninety-seven. Spanning the years from 1750 to 1848, her life encompassed, not only a great deal of personal experience, but also a great deal of history. The Seven Years’ War, the French Revolution, the Napoleonic wars and the Industrial Revolution… How on earth was I going to be able to fit it all in? The fact that another of my characters, John Goodricke, was only twenty-one when he died, presented a different kind of problem. With him, I found myself having to expand events, not condense them. (That my third character, Edward Pigott, lived until his late sixties, provided, I suppose, a kind of happy medium between these two extremes.)

The solution was to focus on the period – in itself quite brief – when the lives of my three characters overlapped. This was (approximately) five years, between William Herschel’s discovery of the planet Uranus in 1781, and John Goodricke’s ground-breaking investigations into the causes of variable stars in 1784-5. That Caroline Herschel discovered her first comet in 1786, the year Goodricke died (of pneumonia, contracted while engaged in late-night observation), was another link in this astronomical chain. And yet it seemed a pity to end the book with Goodricke’s death, since the reverberations of his discoveries continued long afterwards. Caroline’s career, too, was only just ‘taking off’ – I wanted to do her justice.

One possibility was to ‘frame’ the events of those crucial years – 1781-1786 – within Caroline’s story. Thus the novel begins with her, aged fourteen, as she witnesses an eclipse of the Sun; and ends with her, a few days before her death, in her native Hanover. In between, there’s a great deal more – wars, revolutions, and scientific discoveries, as well as love affairs, births, deaths and marriages – some of it narrated in detail, some of it skated over quite rapidly. My aim (like that of my distinguished predecessors) was to mimic the action of memory, and of time itself. Sometimes a day can seem as long as a decade, and vice versa. Or, as Caroline says to Edward, in Variable Stars:

Time, it seems to me, can run forwards, backwards, and sideways, too. How else to explain the oft remarked-upon sensation that one has been here before?

And Time, whatever else one might say about it, is certainly hard to pin down. In the hour during which I’ve been writing this, for instance, time has of course been moving forwards. It’s now an hour later than when I first sat down at the keyboard – an hour which I’ll never get back, and during which I’ve grown (albeit imperceptibly) older. The minutes and seconds that have made up this hour have had their own reality; their own weight. My sensations, as I’ve sat here in my chair, looking from the computer screen to the view from the window (the yellow London Brick wall of the house opposite; its wet slate roof; a cherry tree just coming into flower) have all been part of this – now vanished – bit of time. The sound of a car passing in the street, the sight of a cat running along a garden wall, the feel of my fingertips tapping against the keyboard, have all been part of this moment, too. If nothing else, these words are a record of its passing.