by A. Marshall

Created on: September 25, 2009

The Time Traveler's Wife is based on the book of the same name by Audrey Niffenegger. It's an unashamedly romantic time travel story with the emphasis more on the romantic element than the science of time travel.

Henry (Eric Bana) is a Chicago librarian who has a rare genetic disorder which means he is unable to remain in linear time. At any moment he can disappear and reappear in another time period, within his own lifespan, and interact with people who have died, or haven't even been born yet.

His artist wife Clare (Rachel McAdams) first meets him when she is six and he appears as a man of around forty. He is totally naked, as he loses everything whenever he time travels, but he is careful to cover himself and protect her innocence, so there's nothing unpleasant about the scene. Clare becomes enthralled with him when she realizes he truly is a time traveler who knows her in the future and an innocent friendship develops as he appears to her over the years.

He has no control over where he goes, but is somehow drawn to the same places over and over again. It seems they are destined to be together. Their relationship changes to something on a more adult level when she grows up and meets him at a similar age to herself, and they can finally be together, but the problem is that this is before the age at which he met her, so she has to introduce herself.

They manage to marry, in spite of some interesting time travel complications, but the unpredictability of his disappearances put a huge strain on his relationship. This isn't helped when they try to have a baby, and the disorder seems to be passed on to the baby. On his future travels he begins to bump into a little girl, Alba, who claims to be his daughter. But there are secrets that Alba tells him that he is keeping from his wife.

Really this is a romance set in an unusual and challenging context. It poses questions about love and marriage that are set in a fantastical scenario but that anyone in a long time relationship can identify with. The adult Clare is thrilled when she meets Henry as a young man, and is attracted to his youth, energy and fitness. However, he is a heavy drinker, and a lonely man, haunted by events he revisits but cannot change. Then again she also adores the older, calmer Henry with more maturity and wisdom, the version that she first met.

It highlights the fact that in a long term relationship, the young man a woman falls in love with eventually transforms into someone older and manifestly

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