‘An isolated town neighboured by its own past and future… To the east, the town is twenty years ahead in time. To the west, it’s twenty years behind. The towns repeat in an endless sequence across the wilderness.’
An intriguing premise…! And it is a bit sci-fi, a bit dystopian but fundamentally at its core it’s a love story. The young Odile witnesses a rare visitation to her valley from the parents of her childhood crush. Such visitations tend to only happen when someone dies young or unexpectedly and Odile fears the worst for her Edme. His sudden death sets Odile on an increasingly wretched life-path that only her future self can help to alter.
I thought this was a pretty good novel. It reminded me of Margaret Atwood, J. G Ballard, Susanna Clarke, and even Yevgeny Zamyatin. The world it portrays is dark, turgid, authoritarian, muted, with despairing limits on human happiness and ambition. The characters are not fully delineated or particularly likeable, with Odile especially hard to sympathise with. But the book’s strength comes from cracks of light that threaten to upturn the strangling order of this hopeless place, and even Odile is ultimately capable of heroism.
Perhaps, the story’s philosophical and enthralling setup could be said to be more interesting and full of mind-bending, time-rending implications than the novel actually offers. It is a bit frustrating that Howard isn’t braver and wider-scoping with his plot; I wanted to visit more valleys and get a fuller sense of the universe that could hold such a world.
But the writing and structure are clever enough to propel the reader through the story without getting too worried by the abandonment of Einstein’s theory of general relativity, and by the end I was eagerly turning the pages.
6.5 out 10.
Buy it here: The Other Valley a book by Scott Alexander Howard.