Spoiler alert
I’ve done it again. I borrow books by Alice Hoffman, thinking that it’s Alice Walker… and it’s not. I did that with Practical Magic and I’ve done it again with The Invisible Hour. I thought from the blurb that I was borrowing a book about a young woman and her daughter breaking away from a cult, only to find that I was reading a time travel book about Nathaniel Hawthorne, author of The Scarlet Letter. Now, I’m not opposed to time travel books, but I do feel that they are a bit of a guilty pleasure and that there’s something almost adolescent about them. For me, they are plots built on a rickety foundation that can collapse quickly if I start thinking about them too much. [Having said that, I’m really enjoying Life after Life on ABCTV- more than the book, in fact].
Ivy, a sixteen-year old girl from Boston, is estranged from her family who cannot accept her pregnancy. She runs away and joins a cult in rural Massachusetts, and the leader of the cult, Joel, takes her as his wife and, although theoretically all children belong to the community, takes a particular interest in her daughter Mia. Born into the community, Mia knows no other life than this one, controlled by Joel and his rules and punishments, where members work on the apple orchards that fund the commune and are kept in ignorance of the outside world. Ivy, yearning for the world that she has left behind but too frightened to leave the community, encourages her daughter to go to the town library, located in an old building, and staffed by conscientious and sensitive librarians who, aware of the rarity of a community child coming to a library, turn a blind eye to Mia’s theft of books. There Mia comes across The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne which, curiously, has an inscription to her– Mia- in the frontispiece. She steals this book too, and becomes enamoured of its author, who died in 1864. This book, and the death of her mother Ivy, emboldens her to run away and to seek the help of the librarians. She is stalked by Joel, determined to bring her back to the community and to find a paper which he believes she has stolen.
Somehow, and don’t ask me how, this book transports her back to the 1830s where she meets Nathaniel Hawthorne and falls in love with him. He has not yet written The Scarlet Letter, and she knows that Hawthorne will marry Sophia Peabody and have children, and that although suffering writer’s block at the moment, he will become a famous author. Meanwhile, she is stalked by Joel, who manages to travel through the same time portal that she does. She is aware that she needs to distance himself from Hawthorne in order for him to fulfill the life that he does have, and the menace represented by Joel insinuates itself into both her 1830s and present-day lives.
As I said, it doesn’t bear to think too hard about the logistics of all this. In many ways, the book is a paean to the power of books and reading, and parts of it are beautifully written. I haven’t travelled much in America, but I did travel to Boston and (for my sins) Salem, and I enjoyed her descriptions of them both. It’s the sort of book that would make a good, if rather lightweight film and it’s the sort of book that might attract a ‘Womens Weekly Good Read’ sticker if such things still exist.
My rating: 7/10
Sourced from: Yarra Plenty Regional Library
The Resident Judge of Port Phillip 