An interesting perspective on time but lacks originality

WHAT IF THERE were no clocks in the world? What if you did not know what time of the day it is or going to be? How different would the world have been? Would you have lived your life any differently? Mitch Albom’s latest novel The Time Keeper urges you to ponder over these questions and makes you wonder the relevance of man’s obsession with measuring every second of the day, every day of the month. An author relevant to his times, Albom chooses an unusually interesting protagonist to help his readers understand the “meaning of life” or the meaning of time—the inventor of the world’s first clock—Father Time. As is his usual style, the novel shuffles between two timelines (the past and the present) with three story tracks running parallel to one another. One is a story of a man (Father Time) obsessed with counting everything that is humanly possible, set in a centuries old era when no time measuring devices had been invented on earth, and the other two are the tales of two modern-day individuals (a teenage girl and an old, wealthy businessman) who are used to measuring time as the most natural process of their lives. The young girl, hurt in love, wants to end her life, while the old businessman diagnosed with cancer, wants to bypass death and live forever. Albom paves the way for an interesting yet trite perspective on the most precious thing man considers today after money, when Father Time meets the girl and the businessman to teach them the value of time. He learns this lesson himself after being banished to a cave for centuries and forced to understand the phenomenon he had set in motion by counting time. There are a few obvious references to Biblical stories which I did not find too appealing. And around the end of the novel, Father Time assumes the role of Dickens’ The Ghost of Christmas Yet To Come to show characters their future. Yet as always, Albom’s everyday characters make it very easy for the reader to relate to them and work well for him. The novel is thought-provoking though some of its lessons—it is never too soon and never too late for spending more time to be with the people you love—are reminiscent of Morrie’s aphorisms from Albom’s debut novel Tuesdays with Morrie. Hailed as his most heartfelt novel yet, The Timekeeper is inspiring, as long as you have not read any of his others.