Book Review: Time Travelling with a Tortoise by Ross Welford

By Simon Demetriou

I’m tempted to start this review with a reference to Charles Lamb’s exhortation to retain our childishness always, so that we never lose the capacity to respond to life’s ‘earliest enchantments’. But I wouldn’t want it to seem like I need to justify reading – and loving – a book called Time Travelling with a Tortoise. Still, Lamb was right, and while I can’t claim to be one of ‘the wisest and the best’, I am glad to be able to recommend a book that reminds us of how profundity is often best served playfully.

Look, there’s a chance I’m over-egging this. Maybe a book in which a character called Albert Einstein Hawking Chaudhury (Al for short) resurrects a time machine built by his father in the 80s (bringing things back from the dead, sort of, is quite important as both plot device and point of contemplation) and travels through time or across dimensions, or both, in order to rectify some disruptions to the universe that were caused by his first dabblings in time travel – which you can read about in Time Travelling with a Hamster – only to ultimately learn that getting what you want isn’t always what’s best and that we should love the lives we have, is silly and trite.

I won’t deny that there’s a chance you might think that if you choose to read this book. But if you do, well, you’re wrong. Al may have a ludicrous name, but when your dad’s called Pythagoras and your granddad, whose purple tuk-tuk forms a key part of the time machine and of events in all versions of the present, is an expert in Eastern Philosophy, it works. Especially when your hamster’s called Alan Shearer and the tortoise with a place in the book’s title is called Tortellini. In fact, it’s the juxtaposition of exuberant silliness with powerfully resonant experiences of guilt and loss and friendship and isolation that make Time Travelling with a Tortoise so effective. Al’s motivations for time travel, his emotional responses to the people whose lives entwine with his and with the problematic decisions he takes – especially the relationships between Al and his father and grandfather – are wrought in a truthful and deeply evocative way.

We may not all have time-travelled, with or without small domesticated animals, but we have all felt out of place, all longed for a reality different to our own, all been guilty of failing to realise and appreciate what we have. And we have all, at some point or another, enjoyed the silliness of the wildly fictionalised. So we all can, and should, enjoy Time Travelling with a Tortoise.