A woman goes to sleep in a Paris hotel room on the evening of 18th November. But when she wakes up and goes down for breakfast, she realises she has been returned to the previous morning. This is Tara Selter, who cycles over time – hundreds of iterations of 18th November – through depression, hopelessness, resolve, and gradually formulates ways of being in this lonely new world of which she, and only she, is aware.
If you haven’t yet read the first two volumes in the Danish writer Solvej Balle’s time-warping science-fiction heptalogy, published earlier this year in translations by Barbara J Haveland (for this volume Sophia Hersi Smith and Jennifer Russell assume that duty), you have a thrilling journey ahead. Volume two ended on a cliffhanger, with Tara attending lectures at Düsseldorf’s Heinrich Heine university (that’s not the exciting part) when she discovers another person, like her, stuck in the same loop of time.
His name is Henry Dale, a sociologist who, neatly enough – perhaps too neatly – studies “existential abruptions”, that is, the act of severing of ties with the past to “chart an entirely new course. To reinvent yourself.” Henry is partial to philosophising about their predicament, as is Tara. An antiquarian bookseller by trade, she’s also given to reflecting on the past – including that growing portion of it that is simultaneously the present.
Whatever the future might be, they don’t really question that they’ll face it together, even though Tara acknowledges: “There is something alarming about the thought of being bound to a random person. There is the certainty of having gained a travel companion, but also the sense of having been assigned some of the responsibility for their baggage.”
Reading this, I was reminded of the ability Balle displayed in the first two volumes of the series to anticipate her readers’ questions. The sense persists here of the great care with which she has considered the rules of this world – even though many remain mysterious, and some surely yet unknown to her characters.
Whereas before the questions the book asked were philosophical and existential, the story now becomes overtly political
Missing his son, Henry sets off for New York state. He and Tara agree to meet in 100 days. But he stays longer, and eventually Tara returns to her home in Clairon-sous-Bois in northern France to see her husband Thomas. But whereas before she had the energy and ability to describe her situation (only to have to do so all over again the following morning), this time things misfire: “Our reunion was damp and faltering; too many days lay between us. My explanations were too complicated, weighed down by too many details.”
We feel a similar uncertainty ourselves in the opening stages of the book, when Tara initially delays talking about Henry in favour of academic theorising about the Roman empire’s reliance on wheat, and why the unfriendliness of northern Europe to that crop effectively ended its dominance. But once Henry sets off for Ithaca (Balle showing restraint by allowing the situation’s Homeric resonances to go unspoken), the book attains the high standard of the earlier volumes and doesn’t slip again.
The most interesting development is brought about by Tara and Henry encountering another two members of their select society, Olga and Ralf. Whereas before the questions the book asked were primarily philosophical and existential, the story now becomes overtly political. Unlike Tara and Henry, who have always treated what happened as essentially a chance event, Olga and Ralf believe the loop has been created for a reason. Ralf is obsessed with preventing accidents from happening and constructs a database to help him with this task. Olga, meanwhile, has the more idealistic ambition of systemic change: “She didn’t want to return to standard time, as she called it, without having seized the chance to change the world.”
This is a galvanising shift, and a subversive one. Quixotic as Olga and Ralf’s parallel missions might be, they prompt us to wonder if Tara’s behaviour up until now has been solipsistic, and the potentially anti-dramatic conceit of a day that constantly resets without consequences begins humming with new possibility.
On the Calculation of Volume III by Solvej Balle, translated by Sophia Hersi Smith and Jennifer Russell, is published by Faber & Faber (£12.99). Order a copy of from The Observer Shop for £11.04. Delivery charges may apply
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Portrait of Solvej Balle by Fredrik Sandberg / Ritzau Scanpix