Time Travelers
What are we really talking about when we talk about "when"?
I have probably said this a thousand times but I’m a big fan of places with a history, because basically everything is either time or space, and sometimes controlling one of them feels like controlling both of them. Especially in LA, when at any point I could be leaning against the same wall that Buster Keaton once leaned against, and the only thing separating us would be a handful of decades.
The Passage of Time is something that I find extremely personally threatening but also, from a height, I find it extremely equalizing. Reading about the Spanish Flu epidemic of 100 years ago made COVID feel less like a personal grievance and more evidence we are threads in the tapestry of history, as much as we try to rail against it. Or whatever.
The main character in North Woods is a plot of land in New England, which we watch transform over the centuries from a refuge for a couple escaping their Puritan enclave to the site of a botanist doing all sorts of apple experiments to the residence of a worried mother of a PSTD-worn WWII veteran. We watch the house on the property expand and wither away, surviving a demolition attempt and a fire as the lives and deaths continue to pile up around it. Time isn’t an enemy here; it’s a consolidator. As the human characters move through the narrative, they find themselves added to the fellowship of those that came before. It makes the passage of time feel less personal.
Look, is the cover great? No. Let’s just move past that. The third in a series following students at a high school in the Castle Hill district near Syndey, Australia, Ghosts of Ashbury High was heavily influenced by an archaeological excavation that was going on there while the author, who lives in Castle Hill, was writing it. The story is told through communiques and college application materials written by the main characters, who are falling in and out of love, fighting to express themselves, and grappling with rumors of a ghost haunting their school while one character does his thesis on a particular resident of the Castle Hill site: a 19th century inmate named Tom Kincaid who’s been separated from the love he left back in Ireland. How does a YA book primarily comprised of high school essays written off the prompt “write a ghost story in Gothic style” manage to culminate in a temporal wormhole opening in Castle Hill? Buddy if I knew, I’d have stolen Jaclyn Moriarty’s career by now.*
Not to be too much of a spoiler but do you remember that tweet about Hannibal deciding to burn Rome?
That’s basically what’s happening in You Dreamed of Empires as Emperor Moctezuma prepares to receive the smelly, baffling Spaniards at Tenochtitlan, the capital that still lies beneath Mexico City. The novel gives you an incredibly tactile and vivid picture the life of the Tenochca (because the word Aztec is essentially a fake one), occasionally allowing the narrative to drift into visions of the post-Cortez world of cheeseburgers and smartphones that almost gives Moctezuma a full-body fever.
I think it’s also a good lesson that history is full of bastards you haven’t met yet.
*JUST KIDDING. I would never steal Jaclyn Moriarty’s career. I honestly prefer to just seethe with jealousy as I look at a whiteboard full of insane scribblings trying to figure out how she creates her characters.