The Great Escape

It is often said that there are only three plots and that the Greeks thought of them all; this may be the case, but the idea of traveling through time was one that escaped them. Most other forms of science fiction--flying to the moon, instant transportation from place to place--are as old as literature itself, but the idea of going back to the past or forward to the future is an oddity of modernism and a consequence of our sense of dislocation from previous eras. It was not until the 18th century, after all, that anyone considered that the past was so very much different from the present, and why travel to see what you already know well? Only with the coming of a historical sense, the realization that, in L.P. Hartley’s phrase, “the past is a foreign country; they do things differently there,” did the desire to pay an imaginary visit occur to anyone. In the Renaissance, certainly, people looked back to the classical period as a “golden age” different from the debased present, but even so they considered it inhabited by people pretty much like themselves, hence all those paintings of Madonnas dressed like Italian princesses. Their response was the desire to recreate what was lost in the present, not to view the past as an irredeemably foreign curiosity making a suitable destination for package holiday tourists, the modern attitude that Michael Crichton touches in his latest thriller, “Timeline.”

“Timeline” combines all the ingredients that make Crichton’s books compulsive reading: a fast-paced story, a hefty dollop of scientific speculation set out convincingly enough to be persuasive and an almost cinematic structure that not only keeps the reader turning the pages at a fair clip but also more or less guarantees that, in due course, it will be reincarnated as a movie. For all that he keeps to a proven recipe, however, “Timeline” is in many ways more ambitious than many of Crichton’s previous works, in its looking not only forward into the high-techery of advanced quantum mechanics but also backward into the distant past of the 14th century. One side deals with how a group of researchers is sent back into the France of the Hundred Years’ War to rescue one of their number accidentally marooned there; the other deals with how they survive once they arrive. Ranged against them are Machiavellian entrepreneurs in the present and villainous condottieri in the past; in their self-aggrandizing ruthlessness, they parallel each other in a pleasing demonstration that some things, at least, never change.

In exploiting this theme, Crichton follows in a long line of novels and short stories that have tackled the time-travel motif and, like many of its predecessors, “Timeline” has three obvious antecedents. One is the historical novel, the first product of the new historical awareness that has some claim to being the dominant novelistic form of the 19th century, beginning with Walter Scott and ranging through Victor Hugo before culminating in Tolstoy’s “War and Peace.” The second is science fiction, which supplies the fascination with technology that makes time travel possible. And the third is the now out-of-favor colonial adventure yarn of the Rider Haggard variety, in which groups of Westerners disappear into darkest Africa and assert their superiority over the natives.

The curiosity of time-travel tales is their overwhelming concern with the past: The optimistic belief in the technology that makes such voyages possible is always undermined by the fact that few people ever seem to want to go into the future and view the consequences of technological advance.

Fancy machinery is nearly always employed to enable a retreat into a simpler age, the exception being the work of H.G. Wells, who inaugurated the time travel story in 1895 and whose character in “The Time Machine” famously disdained the past and wanted to see what happened next. It is this preference that makes his novella a surprisingly important work, as it marked the turning point when unalloyed optimism in human potential expressed through science turned into fear, for what Wells’ hero sees, in the end, is humanity destroyed by its own inventiveness. Since then, this distrust of science has grown, and the yearning for days gone by has blossomed.

One of the attractions of the time-travel motif is that it provides an instant solution to the difficulty of reader identification by permitting the insertion of a contemporary figure into a foreign milieu. Modern readers of novels more or less insist on some character with whom they can identify, but the further back into the past a story is set, the more difficult it is to create such a character without misrepresenting the period itself. Fairly obviously, any character living in, say, the Classical period who believed in liberty, equality and democracy, as we understand these notions, would be hopelessly anachronistic, yet trying to make sympathetic and understandable a character who believes in, say, slavery, and burning people at the stake to provide lighting for parties is really quite difficult. It is for this reason that the 18th century has, in the last 20 years or so, become so popular for historical novels: It constitutes the identity horizon, so to speak, the furthest you can go back and legitimately employ characters informed by the same Enlightenment beliefs that are the foundation stones of our own outlook.

Crichton’s chosen 14th century is a much more difficult nut to crack than the 18th, although the dictates of the thriller ameliorate the problem--the pace is too fast, the action too unrelenting for much reflection on differences in intellectual formation. Moreover, Crichton is fearsomely disciplined in insisting on the priority of the thriller aspect over the historical and even the science fiction elements in his story and quite ruthlessly turns away from intriguing possibilities that might slow down the pace. This constitutes something of a problem, for though we have to identify with the group of researchers sent back to the 14th century and see the period through their eyes, the lead character, a young Dutch academic at Yale called Marek, is perhaps the most unbelievable of all the people in the book. I have the greatest respect for assistant history professors at Yale and accept that only the tough survive the senior faculty there, but I doubt that, even if they practiced hard, such people would have much luck matching lance for lance, broadsword for broadsword, with a medieval knight who had been in training since the age of 5 and in battle for much of the previous decade.

Yet not only does Marek triumph in man-to-man combat, he even picks off small platoons while his associates manage to break out of every prison, climb up every wall, outwit every opponent in their efforts to escape from the clutches of a medieval warlord desperate to use the skills of one of their number to fight off a besieging army. This does something of a disservice to a well-researched and brilliantly imagined story, for Crichton tries to heighten our identification with his central figures by making the denizens of the 14th century irredeemably violent--which is a bit rich, coming from an author living in the most barbarously violent period in history--and this, in turn, has the effect of making the inhabitants of the past seem both morally inferior and less intelligent than we are, which they most certainly were not.

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In some ways it is a pity Crichton did not dwell more on the more abstract elements that he hints at but never allows into the foreground, as introducing a softer side might have balanced the story more effectively. In particular, I suspect the medieval mind would have had much less trouble understanding the paradoxes underlying the quantum mechanics he uses as a starting point than we have. While we have to suspend normal Newtonian rationality to grasp the idea of (as Crichton puts it) “universes existing at all earlier times,” medieval theologians schooled in the works of Boethius could distinguish quite easily between perpetuity--an endless series of moments, one after the other--and eternity, the timeless fruition of illimitable existence, overseen by a God who was past, present and future simultaneously. Crichton’s technology, no doubt, would have surprised them, but the basic concepts would have seemed quite orthodox and even obvious. Such an aside would not necessarily have made “Timeline” any better as an adventure, as Crichton has so perfected the fusion of thriller with science fiction that his novels define the genre. But it still would have been fun to read.