A time-travel story that is both a poignant exploration of human identity and an absorbing tale of suspense.
It's natural to feel a little out of place when you're the new girl, but when Charlotte Makepeace wakes up after her first night at boarding school, she's everyone thinks she's a girl called Clare Mobley, and even more shockingly, it seems she has traveled forty years back in time to 1918.
MY THOUGHTS:
This is a re-read from my childhood. Silent reading sessions were the best, and the details of this story were sketchy. The fact that it's a time slip story stood out most, for I love those.
Feeling lonely and awkward, Charlotte drifts off to sleep on her first night at boarding school in a shared dorm room. She wakes up next morning and finds herself in the same room with oddly different furniture. In the opposite bed is a little girl who is adamant that Charlotte is, in fact, her own sister, Clare. It is not the next morning after all. Charlotte has been swept back 40 years into the past.
This is a doppelganger yarn and time travel tale rolled into one. At first it chops and changes. Charlotte is sometimes her own self in 1958, and other times assumes Clare's identity in 1918 while World War 1 rages in the background. The same thing happens to poor Clare, although we never read that side of the switch. Eventually, circumstances transpire to keep them both permanently where (or rather when) they shouldn't be, unless they come up with a solution.
All sorts of school politics happen in both time periods. Charlotte is thoughtful and intuitive, which people don't always notice through her sedate front, although I find her astonishingly slow on the uptake at times. (Hooray Charlotte, at last it dawns on you that women tend to change their surnames when they get married.) Emily Moby, her 'sister' in 1918, is defensive and non-conformist, possibly one of the story's most memorable characters. This little girl won't be pushed around by anyone.
The details of the war era makes the earlier of the two settings the focal point. All sorts of desperate cost-cuttings and rationings become part of everyday life, including the sacrifice of flower gardens for vegetables. When Charlotte and Emily are billeted out with the Chisel Brown family of Flintlock Lodge, the grievous loss of their son Arthur in the trenches of France spreads to impact even the girls, who have never met him. (Whoa, he's a haunting character, in more ways than one!)
The story is not perfect. The premise itself is strained, since the bed portal only works with Charlotte and Clare, regardless of whoever else sleeps in it throughout the years. Even the characters remark on the crazy unlikelihood of this, so Farmer herself must have realised what a stretch of credulity she was creating. It may seem an unfair thing to mention, considering the same implausibility applies to all time slip stories to some extent, but this one seems particularly clunky.
Penelope Farmer's writing style sometimes makes me pause mid sentence to wonder, 'Whatever next?' She matches emotive qualities to simple objects in a way that's a bit jarring. For example, how can a cake of soap have a 'glum and parsimonious' smell? That's super specific. In another instance, chubby Mrs Chisel Brown speaks in a 'fat' voice. Come on, how can a person's voice match their physical shape? It's obviously stylistic, but jolts me out of the story's flow to roll my eyes at Farmer's weird technique.
I think the story is strongest if we read it as an analogy that shows the strain of maintaining masks in our own lives. The Charlotte/Clare swap reveals the exhausting juggling act of trying to be different things to different people, rather than just our own straightforward selves. We can take that on board in this story without the fascinating benefit of time travel.
Overall, this is quite a fun time slip story, though I think Penelope Farmer could have tied up a few loose ends and revealed where 40 years had taken several different characters. I'll give it the extra half star for Emily and for Arthur, who lived and breathed on the pages, even though he's a dead character.
Oh, and check out the song by The Cure.
🌟🌟🌟½
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