... in waking life, she was dogged by anomalies, discrepancies, attacks of jamais vu. In every street, there were new stores and restaurants, appearing at a pace that seemed impossible even for New York. She didn’t know most of the songs on the radio. She didn’t know half of the movie stars. [loc. 628]
New York City, in the year 2000: a Green woman senator is president, astronauts have landed on Mars, the Jerusalem peace treaty has been signed and carbon emissions have declined rapidly. '...the first year with no war at all, when you opened up the newspaper like opening a gift' [loc. 350]. Ben meets the romantic, impractical Kate at a party, and they fall in love. But Kate has a second life: since childhood, she's been dreaming of what she gradually realises is the past, the sixteenth century, where her name is Emilia and she plays an ivory flute for the queen. Not everything is perfect in Emilia's life. There is plague, and she is pregnant by the Lord Chamberlain, and being asked for help by a feckless playwright named Will -- of whom Kate, in waking life, has never heard. She's certain she has a vital task to perform in the past, something that will save the world and prevent the bleak, lifeless cities which she glimpses in visions: it seems that Will is somehow key to this mission.
The Heavens is a mosaic of shifting timelines, memories that don't fit together, and Ben's increasing impatience with the utopian alternate reality that Kate claims to remember. It seems clear from the narrative that the present is changing, and Kate is sure it's because of her dream-life in the past. But the world doesn't seem to be changing for the better: and Kate is not a reliable narrator.
I found much of this novel very enjoyable, though for me it crumbled apart in the last few chapters when the mechanisms were revealed. There are some splendid, and some appalling, scenes ("There was a war going on in this world, Kate guessed, a war in which airplanes were used as weapons. The skyscraper seemed to be a major development...' [loc. 2105]) and some achingly sad moments -- all the more poignant for their ephemeral nature, because by the next chapter they might never have happened. I kept hoping that there could be a happy ending, even after Kate stops dreaming of 1593. But for the dark Lady Emilia and for Kate herself, for Will and for Ben, for the world in which the novel opens: relentless, implacable change.
I enjoyed the beautiful prose, interesting characters, an ever-changing whirl of history ancient and modern: this was absolutely worth reading even though it didn't go in the direction I wanted it to go.
“Are you still from a parallel universe?”
“Who knows?” Kate said. “It isn’t really a question that comes up.”[loc. 2934]
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