Out of Time by Chris Adams Ward
Overall Rating: **** (4 stars)
Out of Time presents itself as a speculative fiction story, but at its heart it’s a novelistic appreciation for some of the greatest American music.
Henry “Slim” Tucker is a young African-American journalist, working in Chicago in the early 1920s. Although he is no musician, he loves the vibrant music, the jazz and blues, being played in the city’s bars and clubs. He writes about singers and performers for the Chicago newspapers. Once in a while, he also gets indisputable premonitions about what some of those artists must do, to further their careers and shape the musical world.
Brian Saxon is a successful British businessman, living in the modern day. After suffering a serious head injury in an auto accident, Brian awakens to find the world terribly changed. His beloved wife is now a stranger, and a completely different woman claims to have been his partner. Even worse, the American music Brian has loved all his life – the jazz, blues, swing, and rock-and-roll that he has listened to since childhood – has somehow vanished. The situation is intolerable . . . but soon, against all odds, Brian discovers that there may be something he can do about it.
Out of Time is outwardly the story of these two men, each unaware of the other’s existence, each struggling to survive and find happiness against an ever-changing background of great music. Neither of them understands their relationship, but over time they come to terms with it, and along the way they play a critical part in the evolution of American music. The true leading character in the novel, though, is the music itself, growing and changing, eventually becoming the global cultural phenomenon that it is today.
It’s clear that Mr. Adams, like his British protagonist, loves the music about which he writes. The book is well-researched, and although there are more than a few expository passages, the author uses some clever techniques to keep them from dragging down the story. Meanwhile, meeting so many of the great artists in the pages of this novel never got stale.
The mechanics of the novel work reasonably well. Mr. Adams has a clean prose style, although this novel needed at least one more careful copy-editing pass.
Out of Time spends most of its plot with African-American characters, during a time when casual bigotry and racism were commonplace. The characters constantly deal with and remark on the effects of that racism as they go about their lives. They don’t get to forget about it, and neither does the reader. Mr. Adams works hard to capture the experience of living in those times, but I’m not in a position to say whether he was entirely successful.
The story also gives a 21st century White British character an essential role in the evolution of African-American music throughout the 20th century, an implication some readers may struggle with. To be fair, neither of the story’s protagonists ever become aware of what’s truly happening to them – the story itself leaves much of this a mystery – and the African-American characters are never robbed of agency. In the end, is Brian Saxon causing changes in the history of music? Or is he simply voyaging, by force of will, across multiple alternate worlds until he finds his way home? The reader can never be sure, right up to the ambiguous ending.
I found the story in Out of Time very engaging, the characters sympathetic and easy to like. Possibly more important, the novel inspired me with a great deal of curiosity about a period of musical history, a set of musical genres, that I’ve never before spent much time with. I found myself wanting to go out and find recordings of the performances Mr. Adams refers to throughout the novel. In fact, I understand he’s compiled a list of real-world recordings to go with the narrative!
Recommended as an appealing story about two men’s relationship with some of the greatest music of the past century.
