“Love does not change, anger never varies. Hope, desperation, fear, longing, desire, lust, anxiety, confusion and joy; you and I endure these emotions just as men and women always have or ever will. We are a small people in an ever-changing universe. The world around us might be in a state of constant flux, but the universe within?” I shook my head, both admitting and accepting the weakness of man. “No, Serafina. None of these will ever change. No matter how long this world continues.”
A Traveler at the Gates of Wisdom started off really intriguing — with a juddering timeline that sees the main character jump ahead through time and space, the storyline eventually covering two thousand years and most of the globe, his circumstances always proceeding as though he is living the same life (and it is the same life as far as he is aware), and with the people around him slightly changing their names and circumstances to match the change in settings — and while at first I was enjoying the novelty of this, it eventually began to drag; another time, another place, the main character crossing paths with the famed and the ordinary, all in service to some oft-repeated, pedantic lessons from author John Boyne. And I wouldn’t be so disappointed if I hadn’t grown to expect more from Boyne. This was just a total miss for me. (Note: I read an ARC from NetGalley and passages quoted may not be in their final forms.)
“Do your memories never surprise you? Do you not dream of the past and the future and recognize both with equal clarity?” He leaned forward and grasped me by the wrist, a hint of his once-intimidating strength returning in that moment as he gripped me tightly. “Your shadow falls both behind you and before you while you stand between the two pretenders, a mask across your eyes.”The story starts in Palestine in the year A.D. 1, with the main character being born during the Massacre of the Innocents as ordered by King Herod; the baby’s father — himself a Roman soldier — off slaughtering first born sons. The second chapter jumps ahead to Turkey in A.D. 41 (where the boy’s father is a Roman legionnaire), then to Romania in A.D. 105 (the father now a Turkish soldier dispatched by the King to fight invading Roman soldiers), and on and on. In one chapter his mother is named Florina, which changes to Folami, and then to Floriana; the specific details of her life also changing to suit the local culture, but the general circumstances of her relationships and social standing remaining constant; and this was all interesting — there’s no denying that it’s an ambitious project to choose this many historical settings. But the attention paid to time and place completely overshadows that spent on the characters — for whatever reason, Boyne decided that this (unnamed) main character would have no stable relationships in his life (wives die, his brother disappears, his only close friendship leads to a betrayal) and the only thing that’s constant in his life is a devotion to art. Sometimes he’s a painter or a sculptor, sometimes a crafter of amulets or arrows or shoes, but no matter what medium he expresses himself with, in many of his lives, if he touches the right rockface or marble or brick wall, he sees all of these lives flash before his eyes and feels compelled to preserve them somehow (which felt like Boyne explaining the compulsion to write?) With no relatable, ordinary human struggle at the heart of this book — and with all secondary characters constantly changing or disappearing — I had a lot of trouble finding something to engage with.
I could not be other than I was and, awake or asleep, images stole into my mind and I sought to reproduce them, in chalk or stone or wood or metal. I was happy to draw pictures in the sand with my toes if that was all that I had to work with. People I had never known, places I had never visited, all of which seemed entirely real to me. And when they appeared, I knew that I had no choice but to reproduce them before they disappeared like sugar in water.I get that the message of this novel seems to be that people are the same throughout time and place, but Boyne keeps ringing the same bells over and over: the main character (so. many. times.) would ask an abused wife why she stays with her abuser or why she even married him in the first place if he was such a known brute, and over and over, these women tell him that they have no power within marriage; that no woman even has the right to choose her own husband (and if the main character remembers everything else that happens to him across time and space, I don’t understand why he keeps asking this question). Throughout the timeline, the main character keeps running across same sex couples; and while he understands that there are people who might have a problem with these relationships, it never makes a difference to him (which somehow explains why he never feels the need to protect anyone whose lovelife puts them in danger?) And while this character from the earliest times is a highly moral atheist (the only one who would never lie, cheat, or betray anyone, while denying the existence of any of the various gods we meet), he is very casual about taking lives; and I have no idea how these murders are meant to reflect on his character (and especially in the last chapter — a utopian future on a space station — where humans have done away with gender and marriage and police; there is no crime in this perfect society, but if everything else is constant for this character, has he still been responsible for the deaths of so many people in this future?)
This whole project honestly feels like Boyne’s lecture to the people on right thinking. In the chapter set in 1832, an associate of Walter Scott’s says to the main character (who is a novelist in this timeline), “There have been some people of late writing letters to the literary pages complaining of authors who do not share the same experiences with their characters”, and they proceed to have an anachronistic conversation about the stupidity of accusations of cultural appropriation (which I understand is Boyne’s response to criticism of his last book, My Brother’s Name is Jessica). In the chapter set in 2016, the main character is the only member of his family who isn’t a braindead MAGA-hat-wearing xenophobe watching the American election results and the cartoonish portrayal of these Trump supporters is neither art or social commentary. And as for his future utopia — it’s not my idea of a perfect future world.
So, the format eventually wore on me, the overall plot was neither interesting nor instructive, there was nothing to the characters to make me engage with them, and the ideas were presented with a hammer to the head. I would give this 2.5 stars and am rounding up because John Boyne can write some pretty sentences.
