The Heavens by Sandra Newman

★★★★

An imaginative, genre-defying tale of time travel and the butterfly effect

At a glittering party in New York in the first summer of the new millennium, geologist and poet Ben meets artist Kate, and the two embark on a passionate romance. The gleaming world they inhabit is almost utopian: the planet is well on the way to decreasing carbon emissions, there is peace in the Middle East, and poverty is being eradicated. However, Kate is prone to a recurring dream that she has had since childhood: a vivid dream of existing as another person, in another place. As she falls more deeply in love with Ben, her dream becomes stronger and more real, and with it her sense that from within the dream she is somehow meant to save the world.

In her dream, she meets an actor named William Shakespeare, unknown to history in her world, who claims, like her, to have once been a time traveller in his own dreams. Each time Kate awakens from her dream, New York and the world around her is a little different; she realises that every action she is taking in the past is changing the world and not necessarily for the better. Gradually, Kate’s dream life becomes ever more potent, her visions of an apocalyptic city become more terrifying, and the changes in her present life escalate to the point where she begins a downward spiral that leads Ben and her friends to start questioning her sanity. Is Kate’s dream real? Is she a time traveller with the means to affect the future or is she suffering from mental illness?

Blending elements of speculative fiction, historical fiction and contemporary romance, The Heavens is an unusual and intriguing novel which defies categorisation. Since Ray Bradbury’s A Sound of Thunder, the chaos theory term ‘butterfly effect’ has been a staple of science fiction, as of course has time travel. As in Audrey Niffenegger’s The Time Traveller’s Wife, which is equally difficult to classify genre-wise, the character’s time travelling is seen as a disorder; in this case, Kate is diagnosed with schizophrenia. One of the novel’s most powerful aspects is its depiction of the terrors of mental illness: of reality not making sense, of one’s life crumbling, of memories that turn out not to be real, and the vertiginous imbalance of reality and illusion.

Beautifully written, the book cleverly alternates between contemporary language in modern-day New York and Elizabethan vernacular in Shakespeare’s England. For Renaissance literature fans, there is the added thrill that Kate’s dream persona is Emilia Bassano Lanier, the early feminist poet and author of Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum (1611), who is believed by some to be the Dark Lady of the sonnets; she is also the heroine of Michael Baldwin’s 1998 novel Dark Lady and Morgan Lloyd Malcolm’s 2018 play Emilia, premiered at the Globe Theatre. Overall, although the plot is occasionally slow and meandering, The Heavens is an interesting, imaginative and intelligent read.

Jo-Anne Blanco (as Arwen Evenstar) for Breakaway Reviewers
Breakaway Reviewers received a copy of the book to review
©Jo-Anne Blanco 2018