Book #83 of 2024:
The Day Tripper by James Goodhand
An interesting time-travel premise bogged down by an unlikable protagonist and a few unresolved logistical issues. Following a traumatic head injury, our hero begins bouncing around his personal timeline, waking up each morning at some new point in his future — never earlier than when he was hit in 1995, but anywhere between then and 2023 or so. The most compelling element here is initially how bleak those later days are, and how that history apparently cannot be changed. He finds for example that his older self is a homeless drug addict, estranged from all his family and friends, and that he’s served time in prison for his role in the death of the woman he’s dating back in the present.
Eventually, he’s scared straight Scrooge-style and learns that he can make changes after all, leading him to seek help for his problems and ultimately win a happily-ever-after with the girl of his dreams. (Weirdly, A Christmas Carol isn’t mentioned explicitly in the text, while It’s a Wonderful Life is brought up at several points — yet of those two classic Yuletide stories about time-travel, the former is surely far closer to paralleling Alex’s situation.) I don’t quite buy his growth, however, and I’m somewhat bothered over the people whose fates he disrupts through his actions, like the man his love interest would have originally gone on to marry before he rewrites their reality. Because he never once comes clean with her — or anybody else — about his circumstances and the knowledge he’s gained about the future, there’s a predatory calculation to his moves that I don’t believe is intentional but goes utterly unaddressed. As a result, she reads less like a person with her own agency and interiority in this novel and more like a video game challenge he’s taking multiple attempts to solve.
It’s also not clear how the other character who’s in a similar predicament experiences or feels about the altered timeline, nor why he, who’s been at it for much longer, was wrongly convinced that change was impossible. And since neither of their ‘day tripper’ conditions is ever cured, it strikes me as strange that the two men are always leaping into a stable status quo where their memory gaps and erratic behaviors are inevitably noticed and called out. (If Alex spends the rest of his life hopping disjointedly from day to day, how can he possibly build anything like the happy home and new career we see at the end, especially without letting anyone in on the big secret?) Such implications nag at me, but this book isn’t really interested in exploring them.
Overall, I think the work succeeds at what it sets out to do, which is why I’ll rate it as highly as three stars out of five. Although all that darkness in the initial course of events is striking, a stronger plot might have left it immovable and forced the doomed protagonist to come to terms with the consequences that his poor choices have wrought. Instead, it seems just a bit too easy for him to figure out how to avoid that fate altogether.
[Content warning for alcohol abuse including drunk-driving, self-harm, suicide, domestic abuse, homophobic violence, and underage sexual assault.]
★★★☆☆
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