Simon Clark - The Fall

This book is about time.

And time is a peculiar thing. Professor John Wheeler of Princeton University described time as ‘nature’s way to keep everything from happening all at once.’ And although scientists have difficulty in agreeing a universal definition of time, most would agree that it is a one-way street: there’s no going back.

But have you ever wished you could change history? Think of those big events such as wars, shipwrecks and aeroplane crashes where a quick trip back through time could save hundreds, thousands, if not millions of lives.

For instance, imagine you found yourself in Southampton on that fateful 10 April in 1912, just before the Titanic set sail for New York. Would you warn those about to board that it would sink? Like many people, I’ve slipped into the shoes of an imaginary time traveller and wondered what would have happened if I’d run along the queue of passengers telling them that an iceberg would open up the ship like a sardine can.

Probably like you, I reached the conclusion that in a very short time men in white coats would have come and taken me away to the place with padded walls where you eat dinner with a wooden spoon.

But I imagine, when all’s said and done, that many people would prefer to change something that happened in their own personal past. How many times have we wished we could turn back the clock and warn ourselves not to set out on that particular car journey ? Or wished we’d never bought those particular shares . Or that house, or that holiday. Or even married that particular person …

If there was a turnstile that led to the past I imagine it would be pretty much clogged by now with men and women trying to rush back into history. They might not be going back with the intention of assassinating Hitler, or telling James Dean to keep the speed down, or suggesting to Buddy Holly that a plane ride on a certain night in 1959 is a definite no-no. But they might be keen to go back in time to avert some more personal disaster.

In fact, if you look back at your own life, you realise there are a few such crucial moments when the course of action you chose changed your life. A job interview, a marriage proposal, or simply believing you could lean just that bit farther out of your bedroom window to wipe away a speck of dirt from the glass… Those life-changing moments seem to teeter on a knife’s edge. So easily they can go one way or the other and the course of your life changes forever.

Now. Although the current consensus of opinion is that it’s impossible, at present, to turn back the clock, many eminent scientists are confident that time travel might be possible in the next two hundred years. They speak of wormholes, black holes and quantum-mechanical tunnelling where particles have been shown to do the impossible: namely, to travel faster than the speed of light.

It makes you think, though, doesn’t it? Wouldn’t it be something if we were given just one opportunity to turn back the clock and prevent some god-awful calamity in our lives? Which one would it be? I’m writing this introduction in the spring of 1998. It’s almost a year to the day since my seven-year-old daughter jumped off a park bench and broke her arm. A bad break that might need surgery and might be permanently disabling, said the doctor. Fortunately, his original dark prognosis was wrong on both counts. Although for weeks after I’d berate myself: ‘Why did I have to watch the end of that stupid film? If only I’d gone and collected her from the park ten minutes earlier…’ Luckily it wasn’t a huge tragedy, harrowing though it was at the time. Still, if some time traveller just happened to be passing through 1998, I’d be tempted to hitch a ride back 12 months. Then I’d dash across to the park before Helen decided it would be the coolest thing to launch herself off the park bench.

Of course, I know I can’t. Much as I long to. That nubby lump above my daughter’s elbow where her bone snapped like a stick of celery is still there. It will always be there.

But time is a peculiar thing. Einstein states that the faster you travel, the slower time passes. In the ’70s a pair of scientists loaded an atomic clock onto a Jumbo jet and proved just that.

And don’t forget, a number of scientists are saying that their successors will be cranking up those first time machines in less than two hundred years.

Keep that in mind as we now move into stranger territories. On my bookshelves are a couple of leather-bound books that are more than two hundred years old. They belonged to my late grandmother, Ethel Skilton. I first saw them as I rummaged inquisitively through an ancient tin trunk when I was a child (which seems next to no time at all ago; again, time plays tricks on the mind as well as on reality). As I typed these opening pages an idea struck me: a strange and thought-provoking one at that. It occurred to me that if I can leaf through those two-hundred-year-old books today, isn’t there every reason to suppose that someone two hundred years from now, say in the year AD 2200, just might possibly be reading this introduction to The Fall ?

I know I’m fast-forwarding towards the pit of total whimsicality here, but consider this: there’s also every chance that in the year 2200 time travel will be a reality. That men and women will be able to flit backwards and forwards through time like we today make those weekly runs to and from the supermarket. (Come to think of it, dear reader of 2200, do you have supermarkets? Perhaps you do, and perhaps that trolley with a wonky wheel is as enduring as Christmas and true love.) Well, here’s my point: this introduction can serve as a message transmitted from here, 1998, into the future. If you’re reading this long after I’ve gone, if the spine of the book is cracked, its pages falling out, and if you have access to that time machine, here’s an invitation to call on me on Saturday 11 April 1998 in the little village of Hampole, South Yorkshire. There, at that time, I parked my red car near the spring that still gushes cold, pure water and waited from 2.00 pm BST until around ten past the hour. Why this particular location? That’s easy. Until now the characters in my books have always been fictional. This one, however, features the real life – and exceedingly astonishing – Richard Rolle, who lived in Hampole from around AD 1340 to AD 1349. Teenage rebel, hermit, mystic and writer, he devoted most of his time, I think it’s fairly safe to say, to ‘boldly going where no man has gone before’. Reading his accounts of his transcendental voyages into his psyche still well and truly boggles the mind even today.

Anyway, dear reader of 2200, if you can make it to Hampole on that blustery April day in 1998, you can’t miss me. I’m above average height, my head is shaved down to the wood (as one contemporary saying goes) and I’m wearing a wax jacket and black jeans. After pottering around the spring and taking a look at the rather dingy-looking monument to Mr Rolle, I returned home for coffee, where I chatted to my wife Janet about my time-travel experiment and about what happened during that short vigil.

Well, I’ve talked about the nature of time for longer than I intended, and I’ve said nothing at all yet about The Fall . Like all of my novels, the story surprised me as much as anyone. So, as always, I wonder deep down if the story somehow already exists in some other place – or time – and I just happen to be the one who sets it all down on paper.