The triumphant return of Garison Fitch and author Samuel White!
The long-awaited sequel to last year's excellent book on time travel ("First Time") is bolder, brighter and better than the original. This book is so good I'm surprised White didn't release it first.
Bereft of the T-rex-size logic holes which plagued Michael Crighton's (still) entertaining "Timeline", "Saving Time" continues to turn the time travel genre on its temporal ear by crafting an intricate story which weaves back and forth through time and space with a rapid pace.
"Saving Time" finds scientist Garison Fitch two and a half years after his previous trip through time. He has begun to make peace with his new world, thanks to his loving wife, a wonderful little daughter. But then something happens. Strange things begin to happen in and around his yard.
Garison and his wife, Heather, take part in a funeral from 1947, are visited by a busy-body from the 1960s, and marauders dressed as Indians from the 1800s come very close to killing Garison. Even his daughter, Sarah, has a brief encounter with time travel.
Then, Garison makes another surprising discovery. According to a super-market tabloid, similar things are happening in the yard of a man who lives where Garison Fitch lived two and a half centuries before. Garison and Heather both realize this can be no coincidence and realize they must find a way to stop the holes in time before they not only cause a change in history but destroy space itself.
So Garison determines to go back in time to keep himself from making his original trip through time. The hitch is that he can't use the time machine. Not only would it have to be rebuilt, he is convinced it's what caused the problem in the first place. But even when Garison figures out what he believes is the solution, he realizes the cost: if he "fixes" time, the last two years will not have happened, which means he will not get to know Heather and Sarah may never be born. Not only that, but he, Garison Fitch, may cease to exist. In fact, he might not have ever been born in the first place.
Beyond the excellent narrative of this story, this reviewer enjoyed getting to know the characters so much better than in "First Time". In spite of my desire to dislike Heather (in favor of Garison's "first" wife, also named Sarah), Heather becomes perhaps the most sympathetic character in the stories, and maybe the most human. Sarah (the wife), while in this story but briefly, becomes so much more full than she was in Book One. And then there's Garison. As Garison becomes more and more real, so does his pain.
Added to this are the myriad people who themselves travel through these holes in time, to their own consternation and confusion. Each of them were characters I would have liked to know more about, but it was a wise decision on White's part to give us just enough to make them seem real.
I only have one question: what does the last line of the book mean?
