★★★☆☆ A Visit to the Husband Archive, by Kaliane Bradley
** spoiler alert ** A clever idea, but difficult to execute
A Visit to the Husband Archive
Kaliane Bradley
** spoiler alert **
A clever idea, but difficult to execute
The fourth story in Amazon’s Time Traveler’s Passport series, Kaliane Bradley‘s A Visit to the Husband Archive, currently has a 3.19-star average rating on Goodreads. That’s not a good number.
In my opinion Bradley deserves credit for attempting something innovative and difficult. It is not surprising that the attempt didn’t come off. Although the overall feeling of the story is very different, the plot is surprisingly similar to Michael Ende‘s famous Momo, in which society is taken over by Men in Grey, who steal time from humans. In A Visit to the Husband Archive Earth has been occupied by aliens who are also time-thieves, and they have stolen humans’ abilities to remember or even think coherently. (Confusingly, the visit to the husband archive that supplies the title is of little importance to the story.)
Bradley‘s problem is that the main point of view character is one of these damaged humans. As a consequence of what the time-thieves have done to her mind she is incapable of telling a story coherently. Momo got around this problem by telling the story from the point of view of the eponymous Momo, a hero resistant to the time-thieves. The husbands of A Visit to the Husband Archive are men and women who are somewhat resistant to the time-thieves, but it is not one of them telling the story.
The upshot is a disheartening and difficult-to-read story that I cannot at all recommend.