Rainbow Rowell, Landline (2014)

Georgie McCool is our heroine: a short, curvy, feisty and funny Californian girl working as a TV sitcom scriptwriter. She’s married to the slightly stony-faced Neal from Omaha, whom she loves and who loves her. They have two young kids together, but their marriage is ‘in trouble’. Matters come to a head when Georgie and her scriptwriting partner Seth get the chance to pitch for their big-break idea: it means hothousing the scripts over Christmas and Georgie missing out on Omaha Xmas with hubbie and kids and in-laws. This, though, is the final straw; she has chosen work over family one too many times; Neal goes off; it’s over. Georgie agonizes at home. Then—and this is the Fantasy premise of the novel—she discovers the landline phone in her mum’s (actually “Mom’s”, but, you know. Blimey!) house calls Neal in Omaha in 1998 rather than 2013.

This is a likeable, enjoyable novel propelled mostly by its sharply written dialogue and by the solidity and believability of its main characters. The plot is romcom-predictable, its time-travel conceit notwithstanding. Indeed, there’s an inevitable second-hand-ness to any romcom-timetravel combo. I don’t just mean that romcoms have rather worn out the idea of time travel, as an objective correlative for ‘weren’t things better back before our relationship soured?’ or ‘how might things have worked out differently?’ (turn a different corner and we never—would’ve—met and so on) or ‘lord keep my memory green’. Though we can be honest: they have. Landline can't help being a little reminiscent of Sliding Doors or The Time Traveler’s Wife or that recent film by Richard Curtis whose name I’m deliberately blocking—or indeed, I was particularly reminded of a short story called ‘The Time Telephone’ by … can’t remember the name of the author (it’s in the Jeff and Anne Vandermeer’s mammoth Time Traveller's Almanac anthology I believe). That’s also about mothers and daughters and magic telephones that can call the past and whether things can be changed. And if I recall, it also has a character in it called ‘Seth’. Or maybe it’s ‘Seb’? But no matter. I read this book with great enjoyment, the flimsiness of its SFnal conceit notwithstanding. It is a very pleasant read. That perhaps looks like damning with faint praise, but I don’t mean it to be. Pleasant is hard to do—there’s real, unfakable charm and warmth here, and the dialogue is always sprightly and sometimes funny. The downside is that the book leans too heavily on it’s one big-pitch idea, and reads like an over-extended short story. It’s not until p.150 that the identity of The Time Telephone is vouchsafed to us, and many of the remaining 150 pages feel a bit treading-watery (though there’s a good set piece near the end where a pug gives birth to puppies).

What it really is, I think, is a sort of love-letter to old-style phone technology, not for its own sake but out of a bittersweet memory of how much the exigencies of that technology shaped lovers’ long-distance interactions back then—all the endless chattering sitting on the bottom step of the stairs, winding and unwinding the windy cord round and about the end of your forefinger, the you hang up first—no, YOU hang up first! gubbins. Ah, I remember all that! But whilst I sort of share the nostalgia for those days, and think young lovers’ nowadays don’t know what they’re missing with their 100% always-on social media phonetexting ubiquity of contact—whilst I enjoyed the evocation of courting in that earlier age, I guess it seemed to me a slender thread on which to hang an entire novel. Still: good stuff.