Fiction Reviews
Spiral
(2024) Cameron Ward, Penguin, £9.99 / Can$19.99, pbk, 356pp, ISBN 978-1-405-95819-6
Charlie is at London Heathrow awaiting a flight to the US. She spies her estranged son, Theo Reid, who is about to board the same flight, but not as a passenger but its pilot.
Ten hours into the flight the plane goes into a steep dive and… And everything goes black.
Charlie comes to, but it is one hour before the crash. Charlie cannot believe it. She is alive, and so are all the passengers as well her pilot son Theo.
And then it happens again. The plane goes into a steep dive and…
Charlie awakes and once more it is before the crash, but this time there is slightly less time before the fated crash…
The novel then takes us back to earlier in Theo's life and his seeking the father he never knew. Theo's mother had sought to protect Theo from his father who had fallen in with a bad lot. But Theo is successful and finds his father. Alas, he too has come to the attention of criminal types…
Meanwhile, back in the present, the recursive time-loop leading up to the crash continues, with each iteration seeing there being less time in the loop. With her knowledge of what is to come, can she change things so that the crash does not happen…
As the novel proceeds, we alternate points of view between Charlie in the doomed present and her son, Theo, in the past in his quest to find his father.
It has to be said that Spiral is first and foremost a thriller, with the time-loop being a MacGuffin. So, if you are coming to Spiral for possible speculative fiction content as your main interest, then you are likely to be disappointed. Conversely, if you are into mundane (set in the day-to-day without any SFnal exotica) then this novel could well be your bag and as such is a recommended read.
Having said all that, there are a couple of brief attempts to explain what is going on: after all, Charlie wants to figure it out. In the process, she remembers conversations years ago she had with a mathematician who once at a party explained how time travel could happen. So what we have here is a rare, natural phenomena in which Charlie just happened to get caught up in. The reason that this phenomena is not known is because even if those caught up in such loops survives (and most people are not in deadly situations most of the time) is that the loops repeat in ever-diminishing periods before ending and so their duration is finite. And even if the very few who had such an experience afterwards tries after to tell of it to others, they simply would not be believed: after all they are unable to time travel at will and so gather proof.
In short, Spiral is a thriller with an SFnal McGuffin and if your reading diet encompasses pure thrillers as well as speculative fiction, then this novel may well hit your spot.
Jonathan Cowie
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