Entanglement

Bryan Walpert

Mākaro Press

Otago Daily Times, January 15th 2022

In 2019, an author at a Lake Lydon Writers Retreat uses workshop prompts to explore the unravelling of a marriage after losing a daughter.

A time-traveller finds himself in 1976 Baltimore with no memory of who he is and no idea why he is there other than the conviction that this is his one chance to prevent something that has – or will have– destroyed his life.

A series of diary entries detail, in reverse chronological order a la The Time Traveller’s Wife, a writer’s sabbatical at Sydney’s Centre for Time where he meets his future wife.

These three disparate strands form the basis of Bryan Walport’s speculative novel about love, grief and the power of (re)writing. As the story unfolds, the reader is invited to connect them into a single, coherent story in which a moment of childhood cowardice renders the narrator’s (narrators’?) twin brother permanently disabled, creating an obligation that will eventually force place his duties as a brother and a father in opposition with tragic consequences. On one reading, the writer-as-time-traveller has returned to save his brother, on other he has suffered a psychotic break as the result of post-traumatic stress. Whether either of these is the correct version is unknowable and depends, in part, on the ordering of events. Does the writer’s retreat precede the time travel, spurring his attempt to rewrite history, or does it occur at a later date as an alternative means of reconciling the past? And even if we embrace the first hypothesis, we cannot be sure of the eventual outcome: Time may simply intervene to stop him (maybe leading to the second interpretation), while a successful intervention will either erase his future self from existence or seed a new timeline in which an alternative version of him is spared his pain. Such uncertainty is, of course, entirely the point.

The first thing that strikes one about Entangled is its cleverness. Not only does the title encompass everything from the superposition of subatomic particles to the connection between the narrator and his twin to the triplicated storylines, the fact that it is possible to construct a linear narrative from its many parts is testament to Walpert’s skill as a writer. He uses the sabbatical section (in which the diarist seeks advice on writing a scientifically accurate time travel story, presumably the very one we are reading) to explain the basics of quantum physics to a lay audience. At the same time, its temporal inversion prevents readers already familiar with these concepts from becoming overly bored. It is also as much fun to go back through the writing exercises to check that the writer has completed the assignment correctly (“[Put] the following words into a passage: bacon, horoscope, fox, conductor, lips, onion, brightly coloured bird”) as it is to connect them with the larger story.

It is a book that requires and rewards full and undivided attention: a perfect summertime read for lovers of science and literature who want something a little more substantial than the latest Stephen King.