He made it to 1882 – first tentatively and carefully, then boldly and recklessly. And finally, once he had a difficult choice to make – to let the project turn into a weapon in the government’s hands, more powerful and scary than the atomic bomb, or to change the future in a less drastic way – he came to 1882 to stay. For he had met his true love in 1882… Kate, his girlfriend in the 20th century got what she wanted – the solution to the family riddle. Julia, the one who belonged in 1882 and couldn’t adapt herself to the New York of 1970 or thereabouts, got Si.

Once I started reading the book I couldn’t stop. Few books affect me this way, but this one did. It reads very easily – there is no character torture as such (which I hate), but there is excitement, when, for example, Si and Julia escape death in a burning building or when they run for their life from a corrupt police Inspector. And the depth of the decision Si had to make in the last chapter is mind-boggling. I can imagine how hard it was for him to do what he did – but I know there was no other way, and I admire Si for his decisiveness.

I disagree with the author on a few important points. It so happens that, as a teenager, I used to think a lot about how the tiniest and most insignificant of events can affect other and more significant happenings, and grow, like a snowball rolling down from a mountain. I just can’t bring myself to believe that Si would come back from the past over and over again and find (as proved beyond doubt during the so-called “debriefings”) the world he remembered completely unchanged. The world, in which – as he had the chance to see for himself – a two-line letter mailed by a man caused a destruction by fire of a huge building just a few days later. Of course, should time travels be real, Si would have returned to a completely new world each time. More likely, he himself would have ceased to exist after his first tentative and short walk in the park of 1882. The idea of being able to jump from one century to another and back by means of a little self-hypnosis seems a bit too far-fetched too. But such is the law of literature: we have to allow the writers to re-invent the world if it helps them write better prose. And Jack Finney, back in 1970, wrote a masterpiece.

Glad to see that instead of shooting words of arrogant ignorance at my country, as so many western writers do, Jack Finney reserves all the criticism for his own country and government. That’s brave and not often met. But that is not why I’m going to re-read the book at least once before returning it to the library – it’s just a very good book, that’s all. The library keeps revealing its little gems to me – just not all of them at once.