Last Sunday I was on a Vietnam Airlines plane on the tarmac in Saigon, waiting for the boarding to complete, before starting the very long journey home to California. I had stocked up on Kindle books for the trip, just finishing up Book 2 of Asimov’s Foundation series, with Book 3 already downloaded so I’d have ample reading material. I decided to check my email one last time before I’d switch my iPhone to airplane mode when I saw an email from a stranger named Dale Bradford that started out with:
Please excuse me contacting you out of the blue, but I found you online while looking for reviewers of time travel books and after exploring your site I see you have reviewed a whopping 63 titles.
As I have said many times in these pages before, I can’t resist a time-travel novel. I quickly downloaded The Time-Traveling Estate Agent to my phone, put aside Asimov and started reading about a guy named Eric Meek, a 60-year-old real estate agent in a small Welsh town in the United Kingdom. The book occupied my time on the plane when I was not sleeping or eating, and I finished it shortly after I got home to San Diego. According to the author, I was probably the first person in the United States to read it. Little did he know, but I was probably the ONLY person ever in Vietnam, and then Korea at my stopover, to read it. Thanks, Dale, for letting me have the honor.
The story jumps between December 2019 and July 3, 1976, presumably the hottest day in the UK in the twentieth century. Eric, in his position as an estate agent (that’s what they apparently call “real estate agents” in the UK) is listing the house of his former physics teacher, Mr. Freeman. It turns out, Freeman, while tinkering in his garage, accidentally created a wormhole, or portal, to a specific place, his garage, and a specific time, July 3, 1976. Eric discovers the portal coincidentally and walks through it, without the permission of Freeman. He is in for a surprise.
July 3, 1976 also happens to be the worst day of Eric’s life as a 16-year-old boy who lives across the street from the Freeman house and the curious garage. The story is about Eric trying to change his own life and the lives of some of the people, including some girls, close to him. We learn about Eric’s first love, his challenging relationship with his father, the people he worked with as a young man, and eventually as the owner of the real estate agency Barrington Meek. He tries to make some wrongs right.
I found the book entertaining, and the author did a good job coming up with a time-travel methodology that makes sense and is consistent. Some of the language, this being written by a UK author, cracked me up. For instance, one woman says: “I was only pulling your pisser….” What the heck does that mean? I had to look it up:
Literally pull my pisser is to masturbate. But nowadays the expression someone is pulling my pisser is used with the meaning of someone is messing with me.
There are many other doozies like this in the book. But that’s ok. It made it somewhat exotic for me. There were very few grammatical errors that I found. The only one was where a character quotes “in vino veritus” which is Latin and means “in the wine is the truth.” But I happen to have studied Latin for many years and I know it’s really “in vino veritas.” And that’s all I found, so that’s pretty good.
The interactions of the main characters are sometimes a bit choppy. For example, when we first meet Mr. Freeman, his is a belligerent and cantankerous old man, ready to call the police to have Eric thrown out for trespassing. But within just a few short sentences and arguments from Eric, he turns around and they start being best buddies, drinking together, and Freeman literally offers all the details about the time portal to Eric. This just would not happen in real life. The same thing for Mrs. Freeman. She has lived with her husband for some 50 years, in a house that had a time portal in the garage for 43 of those years, and she has no idea what is going on in that garage. Seriously, Eric, a total stranger, just walks in and goes through the portal, when Mrs. Freeman does not even know it’s there. This story is full of unreal scenarios like that, and it makes it – well – not real.
There is another time-travel book where there is a portal that goes back in time to a very specific and fixed time and place. That is Stephen King’s 11/22/63. King does a masterful job in that story with time travel mechanics much like those in this book. I gave 11/22/63 three stars.
The author of The Time-Traveling Estate Agent could have worked on the dialog and basic premises a bit more, perhaps added 50 to 100 pages to the length of the book, and made it much more believable. As it is, I found it too abrupt and therefore distracting. But the “whodunnit” questions kept me turning the pages and I finished the book. I enjoyed a fairly satisfying ending.
