HOW TO STOP TIME || MATT HAIG

When I read that the main character of this book was over four-hundred years-old, I knew that I had to read it because it sounded like a story that Helen Magnus from Sanctuary could have penned. Having recently moved back to London, Tom Hazzard looks back on the ups and downs of his centuries-long life and chronicles his movements around the globe. He has lived through plagues, civil wars, World Wars, falls of empires, births of new countries and has seen everything that we can only read about in History textbooks. He may look like a typical forty-one-year-old History teacher, but the history that he is teaching is but mere memories to him. 

I picked this book up exclusively for those insights of Hazzard. If you've been around my blog for a while, especially with these book reviews, you will have more-than-likely encountered my mentioning of a television show called, 'Sanctuary'. Sanctuary followed an enigmatic doctor called Helen Magnus who was born in Victorian-era England and is 157 years old in the first season. The halt in her ageing is the result of an experiment with vampire blood. Her ageing is stopped in its tracks or simply slowed to an infinitesimal rate. Much like that of Tom Hazzard. Yet unlike Helen Magnus, Hazzard's slow ageing is not due to experiments with vampire blood. He was born with it. He aged normally up until puberty and that's when Father Time encountered the mother of all traffic jams.

Haig writes Hazzard's thoughts and feelings about being young forever. Hazzard ruminates at length about how much his apparent immortality has cost him in his life and what pain it has brought to him. He doesn't sugar-coat anything. He is honest about his frustration and yet is not too cynical about his present situation. Haig includes pivotal moments throughout Hazzard's history and throughout history in general, all of which I thoroughly enjoyed. 

Throughout the book, I was continually wishing that Sanctuary had explored these thoughts and emotions with regard to Helen Magnus. These were alluded to a few times throughout the five seasons but not enough for my liking. Requiem and Pavor Nocturnus were episodes that came to mind with specific moments but it still was not enough. How To Stop Time gave me all of those emotions that I wanted from Helen Magnus and even more that I didn't know that I wanted, particularly those with losing a child and living all of those years without them. I wanted all of those thoughts from Magnus and the writers seemed to just gloss over her losing her daughter with a handful of mentions thereafter. I felt that Hazzard's thoughts were more realistic and expected. 

Additionally, Hazzard talks more candidly about how nomadic his life became because of the suspicions and the unaccepting attitude of the people around him because they did not understand his affliction. Some eras called him a monster or a witch or a demon and as a result, he had to keep moving so that people did not become suspicious. I would have loved this within Sanctuary. It seemed that in Sanctuary, Magnus was pivotal throughout history; she in Reims, France when the Nazis surrendered. She knew H.G. Wells. She knew American Presidents. She was on the Titanic. She knew many famous faces throughout the past century. Hazzard had no such celebrity. He was a nomad and moved every seven years. That dichotomy between the two was fascinating to me and I would have loved to have seen how Magnus escaped that persecution, especially during the Victorian and Edwardian eras. 

How To Stop Time was the first book that I have ever read by Matt Haig. I thoroughly enjoyed his writing style. He really brought Hazzard and his story to life. I became very invested in Hazzard's life and what he was going through and what he had been through. I wanted to know everything about Hazzard. This book could have easily been an Encyclopaedic length but it was a mere 325 pages. It felt short but it also felt like the perfect length. Haig is unapologetic about Hazzard's language which vividly brought him to life and he clearly did his research for all of the time periods that his character lived through. It was a delight to read, I loved the twists and turns that it took, the characters that it introduced and I would highly recommend it to anyone that loves historical fiction with a twist and for those that wanted more from Helen Magnus in Sanctuary.