Title: Tempest
Author: Julie Cross
Publisher: Thomas Dunne
Rating: Worthy!
I don't know Julie Cross, but she's a fellow blogspot blogger, and this is the first of her work that I've ever read (except for an interesting and very short story on her website). Hopefully it will be a pleasant change from the disastrous Hourglass from which I still have a bad taste in my mouth. This is another time travel novel but a (hopefully - again!) completely different from others I've read. The protagonist is a guy and he's nineteen and in college, so a bit older and hopefully a lot wiser than some characters I've had to deal with of late - let's see if this makes a difference! I'm always excited to start on a new novel, and always hopeful it won't let me down. Maybe that makes me an optimist, but I've been reading a lot of stories by women about women, so this being one by a woman about a guy might make it interesting enough by itself.
So at this point I've read through chapter six, and Cross certainly has no qualms about dropping her readers right into the middle of the action. There's no prologue as such, so props to her for that. There is a very short intro of some sort, which is more like one of those quotations writers like to start their chapters with, so I skipped that as usual. Chapter one puts you front and center with the male protag: Jackson Meyer.
'Jackson', as a name, is marginally off for me, but at least it's not 'Decker' or 'Kaleb', so I'm willing accept that one, even though to me, it feels more like the name you'd give a child rather than a college student. Yes, he's in college, not high school so again, props! He's also a volunteer taking care of kids, which is a refreshing change from the self-absorbed characters I've been reading about of late. Again, refreshingly different. He also already knows about his power of time travel and is actively investigating the limits of it with a friend called Adam, with whom he's shared his secret. Again, another great change from the usual "I don't know what the hell is happening to me" tripe. Or do I mean trope? What's the difference?
Jackson is in a bit of trouble with his girlfriend Holly, to whom he's said nothing of his experiments, leaving her to wonder where the heck he gets to on these investigatory excursions with Adam. Why he's chosen to tell Adam and not Holly (which happens to be one of my favorite names), I don't know. I get the feeling he's been friends a long time with Adam and has not known Holly anywhere near that long. And he's not going to know her much longer, either, because when he's visiting Holly in her dorm room, having bribed her obnoxious room mate to leave them alone overnight, two men arrive - apparently in full awareness of Jackson's power - and they shoot Holly!
Jackson reacts by jumping back in time, but this time he goes far further than he's ever been able to do before, even though it's only two years, to 2007. He tries to jump back, but ends up in his father's office. His father, evidently not recognizing him since Jackson is, in that time line, only 12, grabs him threateningly by the throat, and Jackson jumps back to 2007. Now what the heck is he going to do? I am excited to find out, and that's a good feeling to have when starting a new novel. One query: what's going on that when Jackson jumps, his body stays behind?! Where does his new body come from in the past if it's not his own body from that time line? That weirded me out, but at least it doesn't rob me of the premise for my own Timeless. Tempest actually reminds me of the really excellent Replay by Ken Grimwood, although it's not the same story by any means.
Chapter three weirded me out even more because I somehow couldn't find it when looking back through the pages, wondering how I had read so much so fast! I thought that Cross had gone from two straight to four, and I was interested in that because I thought it was part of the story, but then I realized I'm just blind, so that wasn't quite as odd and intriguing as it had seemed!
I had a chance to read some more of this waiting for GI Joe to start, and I'm up to chapter 15 now, and the story continues to intrigue and interest. Yes! Cross hasn't made me cross! Having made endless attempts to get out of 2007, Jackson decides to accept his fate - at least for now - and try to change Holly's future. To do this he needs to win Holly's trust and re-connect with his friend Adam, who isn't yet his friend in this time, and he needs to do this surreptitiously so as not to spook them or make them suspicious. He gets arrested using his future credit cards in a restaurant (they're all rejected!) and ends up having to call his father (despite some serious suspicions he holds about what his dad is up to) and pretend to be the seventeen-year-old version of himself.
I'd seen this (the credit cards) as a weakness in the story, so I'm glad Cross addressed it satisfactorily. Having thrown himself back into the hands of his father (and his father's intriguing assistant), he's as much relieved as he is concerned to discover that his 17 year old self is not in Spain, where he was supposed to have been at this point, so this actually helps Jackson's story - that he came home from Spain early because he was having problems. Since his 17 year-old self has now disappeared what, exactly, happened to him? This is another concern I'd, but which Cross has addressed and at the same time presented me with another conundrum (yes, conundrum Do you have a problem with that?!). So he tells his dad he wants to take a semester off school and sort himself out. So now he has a home base and some money.
Jackson manages to finagle a job for himself as a maintenance guy at the youth gymnastic facility where Holly works, so he's able to make her acquaintanceship in a legitimate way, but it's so hard for him not to be able to touch or hug or kiss her. Now all he has to do is win her trust and connect with Adam and he's home and dry, right? Right! We'll see where that goes, and I'm looking forward to finding out.
Disturbingly, Cross seems to know exactly which buttons to press (at least with me!) to keep me really interested in this novel. Perhaps she time travels and has spied on her readers, making changes in the past to fix problems we had in the future reading this?! How ever she does it, this is such a refreshing change after some of the material I've had to wade through of late. The characters continue to be believable and to act realistically, and she has not let up once in keeping the twists twisting and the action out of left field coming thick and fast. This is a great novel and I'm about two-thirds the way through it now, so my optimism is high and I am looking forward to getting my hands on the sequel. I am so envious of her writing and plotting!
Having said that, I have to put in a complaint about her annoying habit of slipping in flashbacks without changing the tense or offering any other indication - such as indenting or changing font - so unless you focus really closely, you’re really not certain where the flashback starts and ends. I'm not sure if she does this on purpose to try and make us feel as time-lagged and confused as Jackson is, or whether it’s just careless writing - careless as in not giving any thought to it or careless as in not caring enough about what effect it has on us the readers - take your pick! I find it a bit distracting. Just saying!
Jackson in 2007 with the 17-year-old Holly has such an endearing befuddlement about how he should relate to her. When you read something like this in a novel it’s hard to tell if it’s what the author thinks or if it’s what the author has determined that this particular character should think. I feel in this case that this isn't what Cross herself feels, but it’s what she wants Jackson to be feeling, and it’s fun to learn that (or to think I learned that!). I'm not sure if it fits Jackson's character properly.Technically, 17 may be juvenile, but not in Texas, not if the other partner is within 3 years of the younger partner's age and the younger partner is at least 14 years old. I think Texas is too liberal - and surprisingly so, given what a conservative state Texas actually is, but I don’t know what the laws are elsewhere, so I can't speak for Jackson's position in NYC. In my opinion, 17 definitely isn’t a juvenile in any meaningful sense, but again you have to relate that to the partner and what their motives are, especially if the partner is male! Ultimately, of course, it ought to be related to how mature the individuals involved are, but as we all know, laws are made only to the lowest common denominator and they punish as much as they protect in all-too-many instances. In this case, Jackson is out of his element, tired, scared, confused, deathly worried about Holly, and so I'm going to go with it and not let it concern me any more other than to share these observations.
Jackson takes a trip back to visit Courtney in the past and fix something he did which he feels bad about. He's supposed to be resting since this time travel is really wearing on him, and he's so exhausted from this trip that he passes out at work. Adam shows up and they decide that this is a golden opportunity to find out about his medical records, so he calls Jackson's dad who shows up post-haste. Jackson is taken to the hospital to meet his doctor (on a Sunday!) and is scanned and tested up the wazoo (and elsewhere) to figure out what this fainting means. He finally gets to have his dad confess that both he and his sister are adopted. This is a game changer. But the whole purpose of this exercise was for Jackson to get a look at his medical records, and he shows no interest in doing so even when a golden opportunity presents itself. I have a problem with that, but given what else went on here, I think we can let that slide.
The big revelation is his adoption and his discovery that he spent the first 11 months of his life with someone else. His "dad" isn’t forthcoming about who that was. The "twins", Jackson and Courtney, had two different mothers! Imagine what a huge disruption this all is for Jackson. I feel really bad for him!
Jackson gets a text from Adam to meet him at a museum on Monday morning at 9:30 and he runs into Holly. It turns out that she appropriated Adam's phone when they were pulling an all-night study session because she wanted to play hooky from the museum field trip, and she has chosen Jackson to be her partner in crime. She already has a backpack full of snacks and a blanket, so they hike over to Central Park. I'm not as sure as Cross evidently is that it would be that easy to pull this off, but my high school never once took me on a field trip, so who knows. I hated high school. I sincerely hope it isn't this easy to disappear from a school field trip!
The problem is that their excursion goes south fast. It starts out beautifully, with the two of them drawing closer and closer, and Jackson feeling better about his circumstances than he has felt since he first arrived in 2007, but as they walk through a wooded part of the park the guy who killed Holly in 2009 shows up like he just left that time and place and came straight here! But there is something even more bizarre than this, which is that Jackson's dad and Jenni Stewart (the one who sprung Jackson from jail that time) show up and kick some ass and rescue the two of them.
Jackson's suspicions were right - his dad really is a Central Intelligence Agent - no doubt why he was in Central Park - right?! I have some concerns/observations here. The assailant guy has red hair and so does Jackson's "twin sister" Courtney. Could the red-haired guy be related to Courtney? Might she have been assassinated rather than died from cancer? Is her chronic nervousness related to something which was done to her and Jackson - something which she didn’t survive? The other thing is, why didn’t Jackson's dad and/or Jenni Stewart rescue him in 2009, before Holly was shot?
Later that day at work, Jackson and Holly are very awkward with each other after what happened in the park, but it gets resolved in a really cute paint fight and a scene in the clean-up room afterwards, until Jackson's dad shows up again, telling Jackson he needs to come with him right away. Jackson goes with him only to be knocked out in the car by having a cloth slapped over his face that's been impregnated with some chemical or other. Again up with the notching. Jackson wakes up to find he’s in a secret location, which is why he was knocked out. The doctor is there together with a man they call Chief, and whom Jackson has seen before on more than one occasion.
Here's where Cross really slips up for me. There's a time travel gene just like in the excellent Ruby Red (reviewed elsewhere in this blog), and just like in the execrable Hourglass disdained elsewhere in this blog. I have to say again that it’s very rare for a single gene to do something major, although it happens. Usually it's a gene network or family which is in control of a trait or a set of traits. We don't typically get one gene doing something major, like giving the X-men their powers, or the 'Heroes' their powers! I have a bigger problem, however, with this being a part of evolution as Cross explicitly references. Evolution isn't intelligent design. It doesn’t plan anything. It isn't trying to make things smarter and more complex. All it is, is a sieve, when you get right down to it.
Charles Darwin himself explained, over one hundred and fifty years ago, that every individual is different and more individuals are born than will survive. Darwin didn’t know this was down to genetics, but he did know that if an individual had a beneficial difference - a difference which came to it not through planning or intelligence, but through happenstance - and that individual found itself in a position where that difference gave it a survival and reproductive advantage, then the difference would more than likely be propagated through that individuals descendants and thereby through that species. These small changes are known to lead to advancements in a species (advancements, that is, in survival and reproductive success, not necessarily in making it smarter), and eventually, in a successful species, very likely into changing that species, over time, into a different species, so different form it’s ancestors that it can no longer breed with others of its (former) kind.
So yeah, there's a lot of random, but natural selection isn't at all random; quite the opposite. So here’s the problem: how would a time travel gene, even if the ability could be conveyed by a single gene, provide any kind of advantage, let alone a survival or reproductive advantage? Cross has offered nothing yet to explain that. She does mention that it’s recessive, which means it’s the shy, retiring gene out of the gene pair (all your genes are paired: pretty much one from mom, one from dad). This means that it has a tendency to persist in your genome even if it doesn't convey any real advantage, because other than killing off an individual, evolution has no good way of cleaning up garbage in your genome - which is why some 90+ percent of your genome is junk: repetitive non-gene segments, broken genes, pseudo genes, viral remnants, et cetera.So this might explain the persistence, but not where it came from. Pretty much all of our evolution was done not by us, but by bacteria in the three billion years or so when the Earth was dominated by bacteria and nothing else. Earth still is dominated by bacteria, of course, but now there’s a tiny smattering of other organisms, creatures with multiple cells, which we in our blind ignorance foolishly think of as "nature". The bulk of what has happened since then, in the last half billion years or so, really has been little more than tweaking and retasking existing genes to new uses. So where did the time travel gene originate? From which gene did it evolve? Or was it inserted somehow - and by whom? Cross has one of the characters tell us that this time travel has been around for a long time - far longer than we have been able to insert genes into organisms, but she doesn’t mention how this is known.
Anyway, that's my pet peeve, and now I'm willing to put that aside and continue to enjoy what continues to be an excellent story despite a small misgiving here and there! So Jackson and Holly grow closer at a mixer her dad arranged at his apartment home to encourage her to feel a bit more at ease with the whole CIA involvement angle. She's definitely pushing Jackson to become more intimate, but he's resisting valiantly. The next morning he wakes up with a hangover, and finds he's had a small removable appliance inserted into his ear while he slept, which taught him how to understand Farsi. He can't speak it; only understand it. What that's all about remains to be seen, but he hardly has time to ponder this when three agents from the EoT - the Enemies of Time (seriously?!!) - pop into this time-space and say they want to talk. They try to reason with Jackson and tell him a few home truths, but it breaks down into violence and two of them escape, but the third is shot and remains behind. Jackson is horrified when, after a brief interrogation, his own dad cold-bloodedly puts two more bullets into him.
Jackson doesn't react well to this at all and the Chief slams him up against a wall and puts a choke hold on him convinced that he's not told them everything. Jackson jumps away to the date his "sister" died and sits by her bedside. He's the only one there. She fails to panic over his aged appearance because she's so drugged. He vows to stay with her to the end. She demands that he marry his girlfriend and have six children. But it's time to have a word about the red-headed child of the family. Jackson has been seeing young redheads and often has a déjà vu feeling that it's his young sister, but the one time he went to the girl and tapped her on the shoulder, he was mistaken. But there have been other times when she has disappeared on him. I'm convinced that his sister is alive in another time line and that she has been traveling through time for a long time.
In other news, his father gives him a date and time and place and asks that he do one of his 'half-jumps' (whatever that is), whereupon Jackson sees his much younger father with himself as a toddler, and his sister, and a woman called Eileen, who actually carried the "twins" although none of her genes were in either one of them. It turns out that his father wanted to marry her and raise the toddlers as a family, but was denied the chance when Eileen was shot as Jackson now witnesses. Jackson took the gun out of his pocket and kills the guy who shoots her. It was the redhead who has been following him. Is this Courtney's real father - brother?
So Jackson, his dad, Adam, and Holly take a sailboat out to find a private place to talk. This seemed way too contrived to me, especially given that no sooner have they done that than a storm blows up and a strange guy appears on the boat whom Jackson's dad shoots. They head back to shore, and they spot a small red headed girl on a dock. Jackson leaps into the water and swims to her. She's a time jumper as we'd figured, but she's not Courtney, as I'd figured. The girl, Emily, gives him a diamond ring and tells him she has been sent by Jackson himself. I think she's Jackson and Holly's daughter from the future, which is where she takes him. Jackson doesn't grasp that she's his daughter (or maybe she's not! Let's face it my guesses suck!), but he goes with her and discovers that NYC is a wasteland, destroyed by something. This is what he needed to see.
Jackson has a gun with him but at no point does he ever use it! Not when wild dogs come after them, not when three other jumpers come after them, not when he jumps back to the present with Emily (who promptly departs for her own time). Nor does he even think of using his gun when he's back with Holly and no matter that three more armed jumpers show up in the hotel, and a gunfight ensues. Why? I have absolutely zero idea. This is really a let down, because I don't think for a second that if known villains are threatening your family, one of whom you know for a fact is going to shoot one of your loved one in two months time, and here they are threatening her right now, and you have a gun right there, that you would hesitate to shoot!
Worse than this, however, is that evidently every one in the CIA is a lousy shot, since no one gets shot here! Worse than that, even knowing he can be jumped through time, Jackson grabs hold of one of the villains even when he has a gun on her and could have shot her and been done with the dire threat she posed. He ends up in the past and has to jump back to the future, again with her. Now they're on the roof of the hotel and although he's pissed as hell at her he still doesn't shoot her. Fortunately for him, someone else does shoot her - we don't know who. Then Thomas - the big villain boss man shows up on the roof with Holly as his prisoner. Despite this, he claims he wants to harm no one: he only wants Jackson to hear the other side of the story. Which is patent nonsense of course, because he's a time jumper for goodness sakes. He could have seen to it that Jackson heard his side at any time he wanted, even if it meant emailing him or typing it up in a double-spaced essay and mailing it to him! But anyway, I'm interested in his side of the story, especially if it can dig the tale out of the doldrums it's just dropped into!
So Thomas now takes Jackson into the future, and he sees a whole different one from the one Emily had shown him. In this one, Earth is taken care of, no pollution, no violence, no bad health. Too perfect to be true. Jackson tries to appear as though he's going along with Thomas, but when they jump back, Thomas takes Holly and throws her off the hotel roof as some sort of test. Jackson doesn't hesitate for a second. He jumps off after her, grabs her arm, and jumps with her onto a soft grass landing. Now if this is supposed to be cool, I'm not impressed because it's wrong in so many ways.
One thing Cross seems to have forgotten here is that heavier objects don't fall faster than lighter ones. We've known this since from around Galileo's time (and it was theorized earlier than that): gravity pulls everything at the same rate, so if Holly went off first, Jackson could not catch up with her, especially on drop of eight stories, which would take her about four seconds to complete! Even if he did (say, she flattened herself out and presented her maximum area to the wind resistance and Jackson went off head first to minimize his) they would still have the same downward momentum, so unless he landed in something really soft, then both of them would still die, yet they find themselves lying in soft grass with zero momentum. Oh well.
So Jackson now knows that he can jump non-time-travelers. Perhaps Thomas knew this and did what he did so Jackson would learn it. Perhaps Thomas is pure evil. We don't know. The two of them get up and start looking for a newspaper, and learn that they're three days in the past, but as soon as they find that out, two jumpers arrive with a second Holly. Time for Jackson to jump with his Holly again, but like a moron he jumps right back to where they left - on the roof! And of course, he finds himself facing a gun held by Thomas. Seriously? I've been on board with Cross throughout this thing despite a few clunkers here and there, but these last few pages are really irking and frustrating me. She can do a lot better than this - we know she can, so why this now?
After that the book kinda fizzles. Thomas pulls out some of Jackson's hair and Jackson immediately realizes he's going to use that to create Emily (another wrong guess of mine!), so Jackson lets him go. Then he realizes that as long as Holly is with him, she can be used as leverage, so he jumps back to 2009 and makes that this home base - again - and he avoids bumping into her on the step that day and so changes the future: now, he's never met her. But what difference does that make if there are a gazillion Hollys in a gazillion time lines and he's met her in at least a few of those?
This was a really poor "ending" to a brilliant novel. I plan on reading Vortex, the sequel in the hope it will be as good as Tempest - but all the way through! And I recommend this novel. I'm sure most other people aren't quite as critical as I am, and I really enjoyed 90% of it!.
