Classic Crichton
This week’s winner
MANILA, Philippines – Shaharaine P. Abdullah is a freelance writer and former executive assistant at Land Bank of the Philippines. She has worked as a banker for the majority of her professional life, “but it’s writing that I find highly rewarding.” Other than writing and worshipping the Smashing Pumpkins, she travels and her earliest memory that she can recall took place in an airport in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, the city where she grew up.
The future belongs to the past.” That is just one of the paradoxical and brilliant premises that Michael Crichton’s sci-fi page-turner Timeline is built on. The idea of our history as a rudimentary force that underlies our present is hardly revolutionary, but combined with the subject of quantum physics and time travel, it forms a rather intriguing notion that makes for a compelling narrative. Is it possible to go back in time? By doing so, will it prove cataclysmic in the indeterminate future?
Knowing of my penchant for reading, a friend of mine from college gave me Timeline as a present. As a kid, I had never been that much interested in the science of things and preferred the escapist lure of the arts. Abstract thought gives me free reign to consider limitless possibilities whereas deductive reasoning often leads to a confining reality, something I had never been good at dealing with.
Authors like Michael Crichton are one of the gifted few that have been endowed with the enviable capability to bridge the gap between science and imagination, producing timeless literary gems like Jurassic Park, Sphere, Airframe, etc. In Timeline, Crichton once again utilizes his signature technical storytelling to weave an intricate and riveting novel about time travel.
The story begins in modern-day Dordogne, France, where a group of historians is studying the medieval towns of Castelgard and La Roque on a dig funded by the mysterious International Technology Corporation (ITC). After growing suspicious of ITC’s detailed knowledge of the project despite its ongoing excavation, team leader and history professor Edward Johnston decides to investigate for himself at ITC’s headquarters in New Mexico. It is soon revealed that ITC has secretly developed a way to travel through time using technology derived from quantum physics. Professor Johnston decides to try it out by going back to the year 1357 in medieval France to better examine the Dordogne project in its authentic setting, leading to his unexpected disappearance instead.
Ruthless ITC founder and billionaire physicist Robert Doniger then enlists the aid of two military escorts and the rest of Professor Johnston’s team, comprised of assistant history professor André Marek, graduate students Chris Hughes, Kate Erickson and physicist David Stern (who anxiously changes his mind at the last minute and decides to stay behind in the present), to extract Professor Johnston from the past. However, a series of unfortunate events leads to the violent demise of both escorts and renders the time machine temporarily inoperable, leaving André Marek, Chris Hughes and Kate Erickson stuck in Dordogne of 1357 to fend for themselves and retrieve Professor Johnston until ITC sends a backup rescue for all of them.
Together, the three battle their way to survival through the stark and brutal way of life prevalent in the turbulent period of The Hundred Years War in France, while David Stern and the rest of the ITC team race against a looming deadline to rectify the damage to the time machine in order to rescue Professor Johnston and his colleagues.
Unknown to most of them though, the callous Doniger insidiously schemes to ensure that ITC continues to reap technological breakthroughs and cover the company’s exorbitant costs in doing so by promoting a radical form of tourism using time travel, despite the evident dangers of its unstable technology.
After reading Timeline, I have come to accept certain inalienable truths in life. First, I will never reconcile myself with the idea of destiny, simply because the thought of a pre-determined future pretty much negates the concept of choice as well as freedom, which is an essential part of my being. Second, people will always romanticize the past, simply because it is easier and more convenient to do so.
For instance, everyone prefers to believe that the 14th century was a world where people upheld chivalry, piety, loyalty and nobility, overlooking the fact that it was also a time when medieval feudalism spawned rampant lawlessness, shifting allegiances, sweeping plagues and constant warfare. I find that most people instinctively employ the same method when selectively recollecting their pasts, painting over the undesirable parts and, in the process, forming a rather distorted view of history. Sometimes, we need to realize that there is a difference between honoring a memory and an unhealthy fixation made up of inescapable regrets accumulated over time. As a result, outdated traditions born out of ignorance are enforced upon unwitting generations, fostering fear and hatred. I have since vowed never to compromise my beliefs for the sake of mere convention and propriety.
Lastly, I’ve learned that there’s nothing like the present to make up for lost time. One of Timeline’s unforgettable characters, André Marek, is a history enthusiast and a lifelong upholder of a lost cause, thereby putting him at odds with the modern world. At the end of the book, Marek makes an unlikely decision to stay behind in the year 1357 and trade a comfortable life in exchange for a perilous, forgotten world that has always fascinated him.
His idealism reminds me of my youth and my friend, who gave me Timeline and who was also once my best friend in college. We had this immutable and inexplicable connection that transcended our differences, but it sadly just wasn’t enough to withstand the test of time. Perhaps it was our youthful naïveté that made us believe we would be inseparable despite our slowly unraveling lives. We inevitably drifted apart and didn’t speak to each other for a period of six years or more, save for a few, fleeting collisions at mutual friends’ gatherings, where we would acknowledge each other as if strangers in an airport about to board different flights. I believe things would’ve continued to be like that had my friend not made a conciliatory gesture earlier this year and called me up one auspicious afternoon in June to settle things between us amicably.
We have since resolved the discord between us and we now both enjoy a respite from all the resentment that permeated our lives during our enmity. Still, we have both considerably changed over the years, so our ties to each other have irrevocably waned as well. Despite our brief estrangement though, I respect our history together and remember it for what it really was and not what I think it should’ve been.
Like everybody else, my friend is inherently flawed but I’m certain of his well-meaning intentions and for that, I continue to hold him in high regard. Just like the poignant words of Richard Lionheart echoed on Marek’s epitaph, “Mes compaingnons cui j’amoie et cui j’aim,.. Me di, chanson” (“Companions whom I loved, and still do love,.. Tell them, my song”), once upon a time, I was fortunate enough to have found a kindred soul to squander my youth with, as well as share the struggles of growing up. After all, our grand pursuits may occupy the majority of this lifetime, but the memories we leave behind will always be timeless.
