Review: Tourmalin's Time Cheques

Tourmalin's Time Cheques by F. Anstey
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

An early piece of time-travel fiction, which has fun with the trips back in time being out of proper order, so the time traveller is struggling to figure out what's happened prior to the moment he's in. His trips are to an earlier point in his own timeline; the premise is that, stuck on a ship from Australia home to Britain, he's bored and wishes the time would pass more quickly, and a mysterious Bank Manager offers him a deal. Deposit your currently-unwanted time in our Time Bank, and you can draw it out later, using this handy chequebook!

The thing is, Peter, the traveller, has been sent on this voyage by his fiancée Sophia, an intelligent, managing woman who suspects (justifiably, as it turns out) that he's infirm of purpose and that he'll be tempted to make connections with young women on board the ship. It's a test to make sure that he's faithful to her, and he passes - but only because he's banked the time that he might have spent with two other young women, who, in contrast to Sophia, are neither intelligent nor serious. Once he's back in England, married, and starts drawing on his account at the Time Bank when life with Sophia gets a bit too earnest for him, he discovers that he's apparently been, as it were, making time with both of the young women, though at first he's, let's say, at sea as far as the details are concerned. He tries to be a faithful married man, but apparently his earlier self wasn't quite so scrupulous, and also kept being creatively misunderstood by his "friends"...

Peter is unlike the solid, worthy heroes of the other two Anstey books I've read, The Tinted Venus and The Brass Bottle . He's a slacker without much spine, who looks forward to being managed by Sophia in general but finds it a trial in particular. He has generally good intentions, but lacks the strength of character to stick to them. That makes him less appealing than those other heroes, but he's presented as so hapless (in Anstey's classic style of ever-escalating farce) that I couldn't help but feel for him anyway.

The ending is a classic cheat, but doesn't completely ruin the book; the journey is still fun, even if the destination is a letdown. While it's not as much to my taste as the other two Ansteys I've read, I still found it enjoyable. I will warn that Anstey has the somewhat long-winded style of his time (late 19th/early 20th century), and some readers will find that tedious.

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