The Map of Time unwinds
in three, interconnected parts, each tied together by time travel and the
appearance of H.G. Wells. In the first of these sections, a wealthy, young aristocrat
falls hopelessly in love with a lower-class prostitute. His life shatters to
pieces when he finds his lover the latest victim of Jack the Ripper, and in his
grief he resolves to kill himself. Before the heartbroken man can do so, however, his
cousin proposes that there might be a way to save the dead girl by traveling
back in time to prevent her murder. Running concurrent to this story is that of
Claire Higgins’s, a young lady struggling against the confinement of Victorian social
expectations. Salvation comes for Claire in the form of a time travel expedition
that’s the talk of all of London. For a fee, buyers can board Gilliam Murray’s
time machine and travel to the year 2000 where automatons have overrun the
earth and only a small band of humans remains to resist them. The human leader
is the dashing Captain Shackleton, who captures Claire’s heart in an instant.
So smitten is she, Claire resolves to sneak into the future and live her life
there with the noble leader. In the book’s third section, a series of mysterious
murders have Scotland Yard stumped. Not only do the murdered victims bear
wounds untraceable to any known weapons, each corpse is accompanied by a
fragment of prose. These messages appear nonsensical to most but hold a secret meaning
for a select few. Together, this chosen group must confront the message writer and learn an unthinkable truth.
That was as scant a summary of The Map of Time that should still provide some idea of the book’s scope
and flavor, but know that Palma’s novel takes far twistier turns than I’d be willing to
give away here. The fun in reading this book—besides its charming prose
and exciting, interlocking storylines—lies in the way Palma snares us into one
narrative and then springs on us that we’ve been reading something else
entirely. Reading the book is like having rugs pulled continuously out from
under your feet. While at first all the narrative trickery had me wondering if
there was going to be a point to it all, when Palma finally plants the reader
on firm ground in the book’s final act, he reveals a grand, coherent vision and
proves he knew what he was doing all along. The pile-up of deceptions for both
the characters and the reader become a reflection on the hazy line between
fiction and reality and the capacity of the former to illuminate the latter. In
the book’s closing scene, Palma blurs the real with the created until the two
are one, indistinguishable whole. It’s a brilliant, unifying conclusion to a
novel built from so many dangling strings.
