The Tourist
by Robert Dickinson
My fondness for strange books is pretty well documented and the weirder they are, generally the better I like them. This months’ review book certainly qualifies. One of the best weird things about it is how normal the language is, characters very calmly talk about all sorts of totally bizarre situations in such an ordinary way that you find yourself going back over lines to make sure they just said what thought they said. But I’m getting ahead of myself, which given the nature of this book is unsurprising, better perhaps to start with a simple synopsis. The story, though not the book, begins with a tour guide. He’s somewhat jaded with his job. He’s sick of the tourists he has to take on their little, safe adventure and while they shop and gawk he thinks about his next career move. Then he loses one of his group. This is a very serious problem because the tours he runs are from citizens of the twenty fourth century who are here to see the strange and dangerous twenty first. Somewhere in the twenty fourth a prisoner is being offered a chance to redeem herself by undertaking a dangerous mission. Accompanying her is a young man she met as an old man, when she was young. Linking them is the missing tourist, who to be honest is neither.
This is obviously a time travel story, which is probably one of the most familiar of science fiction tropes, but it’s a pretty interesting approach and there’s a lot more of the paradoxical strangeness in it that you’d usually find in this sort of story. Even the structure is odd, with the tour guide written in first person and the prisoner in second person. Seeing ‘you go here’ and ‘you wonder about this’ in her parts is a little unsettling, which I imagine is the general idea. The book also explores time travel as a commodity and looks at what that would do to a culture’s perception of cause and effect. It also tries to imagine what we people do if there was a sanctioned tourist industry from the future.
While the main storylines of the two major characters are easy to follow, it’s the meta story of their intersection that is where the book starts to tie your brain in knots. This is revealed through a third character who interacts with the Guide and the Prisoner at various times, while out of synch chronologically to both of them. Confused? Well, I’ve left most of the details out so that it’s still worth reading. A certain confusion is to be expected, but as I said earlier this is a very strange book and at the end you’ll have just as many questions as you had at the start. They’ll just be different.