Tom can have any material pleasure he so desires, but love is off the table-”because otherwise you will slowly lose your mind.” Tom did fall in love once-unwisely, as he tries to convince himself even to this day-when he was working with Shakespeare, and lost his love, Rose, to plague. After all, scientists and organizations around the world with unknown motives would surely want to get their hands on Albatrosses to discover the secret of their survival, putting them in mortal danger if they were to reveal the truth-not to mention the more analog dangers of villagers thirsting to hunt witches, or doctors thinking they’re witnessing madness.Īs its mysterious leader Hendrich (for the record: Anthony Hopkins would nail this role) tells Tom early on, “the first rule is that you don’t fall in love” with “mayflies”, as the Albatross calls ordinary people who don’t have their condition. If he works to recruit people like them-namely, people who have lived for centuries while barely aging-the Society, with its infinite resources, will help him choose whatever life he wants every eight years (eight years being a reasonable amount of time before people start getting suspicious). He has spent nearly his entire life on the run, afraid to stay in any one place for too long, allowing him to work both as a musician for Shakespeare and play piano in a Paris bar during the Gilded Age, but robbing him of the opportunity to make a home.įortunately, at the turn of the 20th century, the Albatross Society-named for the belief that albatrosses live a long time-steps in, offering him a deal. At a certain point during his adolescence, people started to notice that Tom didn’t age, which led to his mother being tried and drowned as a witch in rural England. Our narrator and protagonist is Tom Hazard, a high school teacher in present-day London, whose secret is that he was actually born 439 years prior and ages extremely slowly-almost unnoticeably, and is resistant to illness and disease. The story is intriguing even if it never quite fully rises to its potential.

There are certainly delights to be found in How to Stop Time, despite its tendency to oversimplify.

That’s not a knock on How to Stop Time, but perhaps it does explain my lingering dissatisfaction with the thin mythos of the novel and the too-quick wrap-up at the end. The sharp jumps back and forth through time-the current-day actions neatly cut through with relevant flashbacks that amplify their poignance-practically slot themselves into your brain as visual media. Perhaps it’s a case of hindsight informing an opinion after the fact, but as soon as I read that How to Stop Time had already been optioned for a film (set to star Benedict Cumberbatch of Sherlock fame) before the novel hit shelves, it occurred to me that the pacing of Matt Haig’s newest novel reminded me of a screenplay more than a novel.

Matt haig how to stop time