A Review of Kate Mascarenhas’ “The Psychology of Time Travel”
Time Travelling Grandmothers
Kate Mascarenhas’ debut novel, The Psychology of Time Travel, sure ticks off a lot of boxes. Is it a book about female engineers? Yes, it is. Is it a book where some of the characters are women of colour? Sure. Is it a book where some characters are lesbians or bisexuals? Yep, yep, yep. And is it a tome where a character or two suffers from mental illness? Tick, tick, tick off that box, too. Thus, you can easily conclude that there’s a lot of good stuff going on with this book, which is a mystery thriller as well as being a sci-fi novel about time travel.
Well, I have good things and bad things to say about this read, so I’ll start with the good first. For a book about time travel, there are some interesting rules about the subject that this book sets down: namely, time travellers cannot change or alter the future and past. Paradoxes do not exist. How the book deals with this is quite novel and original. What’s more, it is possible to communicate with people in the past or future by telephone. As quirky as that might sound, that, to me, is an original thing that the author has cooked up about time travel. Thus, the author has deeply thought about the rules of time travel and how they shoehorn into her story.
However, as much as I hate to say it for all the good that this novel does, this isn’t a terribly well-written book. There are no literary fireworks, and the writing is pedestrian enough to get into a non-paying SF writers’ market, let alone one a notch or two up into quasi-pro. It’s also a hard book to get into. The book starts off with what seems to be a murder in a locked room. While blood and violence are more than suggested, the way the scene is written makes one wonder if the best way to enjoy the gruesome spectacle is by drinking tea and eating crumpets.
The Psychology of Time Travel is a story about four British engineers, all female, who, in the book, invent time travel in the late 1960s. Flash forward to the present and one of them winds up being found shot to death in the boiler room of a London toy museum. The woman who finds the body suffers from some post-traumatic stress disorder of sorts, and figures that the best way to deal with it is to join the team of time travellers called the Conclave that the four pioneers have set up and try to solve the mystery. Meanwhile, one of the four pioneers got kicked off the team early because she suffered from bipolar depression, and her granddaughter winds up having an affair of sorts with another one of the pioneers for no discernable reason.
If that sounds like a lot of plot, well, it does because there is a lot going on in this novel. I would argue that it’s too busy. New characters are introduced and then thrown to the wayside, making it tough to understand what’s really going on. There are also several plot holes and things that don’t make much sense that is so big or problematic in the context of the novel that you could drive a Mac truck through them. One of them is that the original group of time travel pioneers, sometime in the late ’80s and early ’90s, constructed a toy for children called a Candybox, where, if you dropped candy into the box, it would be transported exactly one minute into the future. Besides being a rather dumb idea for a toy, it turns out these boxes were recalled because sometimes the candy would ricochet back and injure the child — but somehow the author ignores the fact that time machine technology in this book runs on nuclear fuel that produces radiation, so my question is how on earth would a time travel toy for children get approved if it emits radiation? How would that even happen?
However, the novel’s biggest sin is that it’s quite boring — I really had to force myself to read this book, which is strange since time travel is such an exciting subject — and oftentimes this volume doesn’t make much sense. We’re shown that new time travel recruits to the Conclave have to undergo hazing rituals in order to make the cut, and one of those rituals is going up to strangers and informing them that a relative they love is about to die (a fact that the person being tested in the ritual would know about because, well, they’re a time traveller). Think about this: even though the novel makes the point that the Conclave is sort of like the Vatican with no outside influence on it, I’m pretty sure that this “Angel of Death” ritual — as it is known as in the book — would very quickly be stopped by the police or government after howls of outrage from the public.
In the end, The Psychology of Time Travel is a very silly little book. A lot of it just doesn’t make sense, and it is too smug in its own rules about time travel to be taken too seriously (there’s a list of time travel slang terms at the end of the book, to wit). It’s too bad that it is such a disappointing read, because the book does a lot of good for the role of women in science, the role of people of color in terms of visibility and the role of people who suffer from mental illness to a degree in this volume. However, when you write a book, you must do more than just check off a list of things that are admirable to include in your story. You must write something engaging. That’s a checkbox that Kate Mascarenhas doesn’t tick off, leaving her work surprisingly mundane and every day for a topic that’s so extraordinary. Too bad. So sad. Try again next time.
Kate Mascarenhas’ The Psychology of Time Travel will be published by Crooked Lane Books on February 22, 2019.
Of course, if you like what you see, please recommend this piece (click on the clapping hands icon below) and share it with your followers.
Get in touch: zacharyhoule@rogers.com.
