Today I am delighted to be hosting a guest post from one of my favourite authors. I was impressed by Shelan Rodger‘s debut novel, Twin Truths, so was excited to be sent an early review copy of her second, Yellow Room, earlier this year.
Yellow Room blew me away. Check out my thoughts on it by clicking here.
The book was launched at a fabulous party in London last month and we can now enjoy the blog tour of which this post is a part. Below Shelan reflects on the notion that time is not linear and that, at some level, we carry knowledge of the future inside of us. I hope that you find her thoughts on the subject as interesting as I did.
Please welcome to neverimitate, Shelan Rodger.
.
From the moment we are born, we start cramming our suitcase with our past. Yet, as I get older, I grow more and more convinced that time is not linear and that, at some level, we also carry knowledge of the future with us.
I will spend the rest of my life with an image of fear in my partner’s eyes, which at the time seemed extreme, but which has been born out since by the trauma of brain surgery. It was as if his body already knew.
When I dipped into my own books to prepare this blog post, I came across two passages about the notion of flash-forwards:
From Yellow Room:
‘The smell of human skin hit her the moment she entered the airport building (…) The flashback from ten years before was so acute it made her want to cry (…) at least we’re spared flash-forwards, thought Chala – imagine a world in which a certain smell or tune conjured up with the same intensity an experience yet to be lived. (…) Ignorance of the future is what makes us strong, she thought; hope is only possible because of it.’
From Twin Truths:
‘Imagine if flash-forwards to the future existed, how many events would seem unbelievable, laughable even, or just plain intolerable. I imagine life as a pile of bones without the flesh of time to join the different bones together and fatten the relationship between them…’
Yes, I am glad I cannot see into the future. And yet it is as if the cells of our flesh intuit at some level what is going to happen. We may only become aware of this in hindsight, may only see the signs looking back, but they are there, in our bodies, working slowly on preparing us for our futures. There is something of this notion behind one of the last lines of Yellow Room:
‘On the horizon of her being, her observer sat, quietly nonchalant and waiting for her future.’
Can you relate to this? Can you look back now and realize that somehow, somewhere, at some level, you ‘already knew’? When you look back and turn your life into a story, can you remember something that was said – by you or someone else – which now seems prophetic, which makes sense now with what has happened since? Is there a moment you felt something strange, a twinge of something you didn’t understand at the time, but which has come back quietly to haunt you since?
Both my novels explore the impact of the past in different ways, the way our pasts shape our sense of who we are, the scars we carry with us into the future. And yet these scars, which we so readily associate with the past, are perhaps also scars for what is still to come…
This post is part of the Yellow Room Blog Tour. Do check out the other stops, detailed below.
neverimitate 