Ellery Lloyd is the pen name of husband-and-wife team Collette Lyons and Paul Vlitos also known for The Final Act of Juliette Willoughby. Time to Burn is a time travel story, and like most time travel story does not let anything like the science of time travel stand in the way of a rollicking tale of alternate futures and revenge. In that way it sits firmly in the tradition of books like Kaliane Bradley’s The Ministry of Time or even the Back to the Future series, which play fast and loose with the idea of time travel in order to just have a good time.
Phoebe Hunt is a documentarian who has been hired to make a profile of fabulously wealthy innovator Inigo Frank. Frank has cracked the secret of time travel and is using it to provide historical tours to the mega-wealthy. Phoebe’s first day is a day of a crisis – a group that had been sent back to experience London during the Blitz has returned injured and with Sasha, one of their party left behind. Phoebe is shocked when she realises that Sasha is someone she used to know. Moreover, Sasha has reasons to want revenge on Phoebe and possibly the world as a whole. In the aftermath, Phoebe is warned that messing with time can cause “glitches” in reality where people remember the alternate lives that they had lived until deliberate changes to the past change their reality. Phoebe doesn’t believe this until she experiences it for herself, finding that a significant part of her life no longer happened, and then things get even weirder.
In amongst this there is also a backstory story that brings most of the characters together. This is the story of a commune called the Living Family which was run by Phoebe’s parents, which ended in a fatal fire. Phoebe herself had made a documentary about the place and the mystery surrounding both the fire and her father’s disappearance after the disaster. It turns out a number of other characters have connections to those events which Phoebe will learn are not quite as she remembered them as a child.
There is more than a fair amount of suspension of disbelief required to make Time to Burn work but Lloyd succeeds. For a start, much like Back to the Future, readers have to accept that changes made in the past somehow propagate slowly (think of the photograph fading in that film). And that when things are changed, people most affected by the change still remember their old lives, at least for a time until those memories fade. Readers also have to accept that small changes 80 years ago don’t ripple out too much that the world is a completely different place (so that one character, whose grandfather is put off his life course in 1941, is still alive in the present even though, logically, the path that led to her grandfather’s wealth, and therefore presumably also to her eventual birth would never have occurred).
There is also not too much depth in the characters themselves. But this is a thriller. There are “bad guys” – Inigo Frank and wealthy property mogul Harry Allen – and “good guys” – Phoebe and her partner David and another mysterious figure called Lucien. And then the slightly more complicated players like Sasha.
Which is all to say that Time to Burn is a book where it is best to turn off critical faculties. It falls apart if readers stop to think about the logic too much. But when it is firing, Time to Burn is fast paced, twisty and cleverly constructed. If that is what readers are after then it is best to just strap in and go along for the ride.
Time to Burn by Ellery Lloyd
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