The Order of Time

There are two scenes about time travel that I really like. One is from the Breaking Bad series. Walter White and his attorney Saul Goodman are fugitives awaiting secret transport. To pass the time, Saul asks the scientist what he would do if he could build a time machine. But Walter doesn’t accept the premise. He snarls: ‘You are not talking about a time machine, which is both a real and theoretical impossibility. You are talking about regrets, so if you want to ask about regrets, just ask about regrets, and leave all this time-travelling nonsense out of it!’

The other is from one of Stephen King’s later stories. A man grows old and dies. After death, he finds himself in an office building where an angel takes the old man through the mistakes and crimes of his life, for which he has never taken responsibility. The angel gives the old man two options. Option one is to live his life again, but with a catch: although the illusion of free will is promised to him, in practice he will live exactly the same life as before, making the same mistakes and hurting the same people. Option two is to go into the afterlife – whatever form that takes. The old man chooses option one. Cut to the 1940s. An exhausted mother holds her newborn in her arms. Relatives lean and coo over the baby, whose life is just beginning. Imagine all the possibilities…

Both these scenes undercut the concept of time travel. Walter White says time travel is impossible, King that it wouldn’t make a difference. In ‘A Sound of Thunder’ Ray Bradbury is more pessimistic still – in this story it is possible to return to the past, but you have to be bodyguarded, walk on a narrow pathway, and the slightest deviation can have world-altering consequences.

In The Other Valley, teenager Odile Ozanne finds an art book in her mother’s house that includes a bird’s-eye picture of her hometown:

Our small town in the middle was nestled against the lake, which stretched like a finger up and down the page. The mountains surrounding us were tall and empty. 

To the left of the mountains was an identical small town, on the shore of an identical lake. To the right, it was the same: the mountains, the lake, the town again. After each valley came another. The towns repeated in both directions, east and west. 

In the Conseil building, Odile finds another, larger map: 

It covered much more terrain than the engraving in my mother’s book: here I counted a dozen lakes in each direction, with intricate details in the mountains. The map showed the border fences, represented as raised silver lines enclosing the towns and some surrounding land. The enclosures formed loose circles, crossing the lakes to capture a crescent of each western shore. 

The concept here is that if you managed to get to the valley west, managed to evade the fence and border guards and so forth, you would reach the same town but twenty years in the past. Fight your way east, you reach the same town twenty years in the future. On the Conseil map Odile notices ‘what I realised were temporal designations’ – the western valleys are situated farther and farther back in twenty-year increments, and the eastern valleys travel further and further forward. 

The Conseil would have approved of Ray Bradbury’s ‘A Sound of Thunder’ – it could have been a set text for their apprentices. The Conseil is the authority of the valley, guiding and absolute, with a small army of border guards to carry out its orders. Anyone who wants to leave the valley must make a petition in the conseil halls. Most of the time the answer will be no. Only the significantly bereaved get to make the trip, and even then it’s a tightly controlled journey. Petitioners are escorted under armed guard to a certain location in the other valley. They must wear creepy wooden masks that obscure their faces, and they must not speak or interact with anyone. We don’t know what happens to petitioners who break the rules, but we can guess. Ray Bradbury’s path was a leisurely stroll in comparison. 

Why is all this necessary? Because, the Conseiller explains to Odile’s class, ‘A person goes west, he interferes, and then new time rolls over him like a wave, leaving nothing behind. It’s as simple and ruthless as that.’ And that justifies the Conseil’s power: ‘We are the bulwark against nonbeing. Against a replacement so utter and complete that what is lost is never mourned.’ The instructions are bolstered by ceremonies. Odile remembers annual Cherishment ceremonies, ‘half listening to the conseiller drone about the town and the harvest and the wisdom of the Conseil.’ There are also bloody fairy tales about people who jump the fences and cause irreversible damage. (There is a terrific creepy line from the folklore descriptions: ‘They hated her, but they could not banish her. She was, after all, the same person they mourned.’)

‘What do you think you are preserving?’ demands a failed petitioner, before he’s taken away. The Other Valley is a lovely, surreal, frightening read. Scott Alexander Howard captures the life of a closed community in brilliant prose, rich but somehow spare. People grow up, finish school and then take apprenticeships in various local trades (only the most promising students get to apprentice for the Conseil). There is no internet, no computers and the valleys do not even seem to have telephones. People communicate face to face or by written messages. Streets are boulevards, or the rue de this or that: squares are the Place du X or Y. Border cops are gendarmes. People’s names seem Francophone: Pichegru, Raimond, Verdier, Rosso, Gagne, Cassar. It all gives a period charm to the narrative: we’re just never sure which period. There are many lyrical appreciations of the landscape, the days, the nights, the forest, fences and mountains. You can understand why people don’t want to leave this self contained world… except sometimes in their secret hearts. 

There’s a lot to be said for living only in the present. I remember a Zen tweet that claimed the amount of time in a day that people are aware, conscious, present in their surroundings was a fraction – five minutes, no more. The rest of the time we’re thinking about the past or planning the future. In the valleys mindfulness is enforced at gunpoint. Odile appreciates the beauty of her little world, but most people seem to be scrambling for status in the closed system (and Odile herself has a cold ambition that motivates many of her actions). It’s all very nepotistic and rule bound. The only real rebel character is Odile’s brilliant, gradiloquent hilarious school friend Alain. ‘They should dismantle the fences and fire the conseillers and let us all run wild.’ Alain pays a hard price for his independent mind, ending up banished to the outer edges of town. Odile’s own fall from grace gives us a long look at this rougher side of the valley, a place of violence and exploitation and a perilous reliance on alcohol. 

The ending will be a surprise to you, but it will also make you wonder – about our responsibilities to ourselves, and to each other. The Other Valley is a joy to read, a great work of imaginative fiction and perhaps the best time travel story.