The Time Traveller's Club
Author: Mark Roland Landale
Publisher:Matador
Reviewed By: Sandra Scholes
So the first two chapters serve as an introduction while the third one has Digby telling his friends of his early studying time and mind mapping. Digby and his dear friend Clara, a fellow scientist at the institute bounce around theories until they start to sound truly absurd. For Digby, though nothing can change his mind; he still wants to time travel to the dim and distant past, bit rather than for science's sake, Digby wants to go back to the eighties to watch Back to the Future when it first got released to the masses. You would think this idea was below a scientist but Digby is seen as much less than eminent by his peers.
Also if you didn't get it at first Digby's constant name dropping of eighties stars, movies and bands is due to the characters (and authors ) love of all things eighties, so its a matter of going with the flow if you want to make sense of the story. Milton Mildew is Digby's nemesis who rubbishes all his theories seeing him as a time waster. Once Digby has succeeded with his hourglass experiment, he considers setting up his Time Dream Team to help him out on his time travelling escapades.
Digby dreams of marrying Clara who could easily be a figment of his imagination from the movie Back to the Future 3 and could his friends from the club. In fact, every character from the book could be him daydreaming while other scientists browbeat him at the institute. Digby acts as a sort of HG Wells from Time After Time, quiet spoken, intelligent, quirky and mocked but it doesn't stop him creating the Dreamliner which acts as a plane to take them back and forth in time.
His journey into the Victorian era proves to be what he always wanted, meeting Isambard Brunel the famous engineer only to tell him he lives with Sherlock Holmes. As I worked my way through the book, like The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy, Digby has also written a time travellers guide though it is as yet unpublished. Langdale's use of characters made me think Digby hadn't had any time travelling fun at all but as he kept on with his travels to and from Victorian England and beyond, even taking Brunel to the future shows time travel is possible and his brilliance should not be mocked but Langdalws earlier constant mention of all things the eighties could have become annoying. I was glad he eased up on them part of the way through the novel as I thought he might have relied on them for too much of the story. As for the story, I found it to be a rollicking fun melange of technobabble, humour and adventure I thoroughly enjoyed.
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