The Day Tripper by James Goodhand

The year is 1995. Alex Dean, the protagonist of The Day Tripper, is a promising 20-year-old man at the cusp of a life with much to forward to. In a brand-new relationship with Holly Chan, a trainee doctor with corkscrew hair and a unique sense of style, Alex is having the time of his life.

In two weeks, he’s headed to Cambridge to pursue a degree he qualified for a year ago. Life is good until he runs into his childhood nemesis, Blake Benfield. A brawl ensues on the bank of the Thames. It ends in Alex being beaten up and flung into the river.

He wakes up a 35-year-old alcoholic living in squalid shared quarters, four weeks behind on his rent. He busks for a living and there’s no sign of Holly in his life. It is the year 2010 and Alex quite literally has no clue what happened to his once-bright future, where the last 15 years of his life vanished, why he is in the situation he is in or whom he can ask.

The next day, Alex wakes up in 2019, another nine years older but no wiser about the cause of his current predicament.

“This life I’m experiencing is all effect. But what of the cause? What has led me to this?”

Each day dawns in a different year following no particular sequence or logic. Chronology is absent—a day in 2010 followed by one in 2019, followed by a day in 1999. What remains is the memory of the days he lives through even if he doesn’t know how he got there.

It's a baffling situation and what makes it crazier still is that when Alex lands on a particular date, it’s like he has already lived everything up to that day even though he hasn’t. And nobody in his life, other than himself, is surprised by his circumstances. To them, they’re merely the effects of his choices over the years. Except Alex has no memory of ever having made those choices or even living through those years.

The Day Tripper has an intriguing premise which is a great jumping-off point to talk about the illusory nature of time.

“We are eternally surrounded by our own past and our own future. The present is merely the conscious experience of a particular instant of one’s existence.”

Like most novels with a time travel premise, The Day Tripper tips its hat to Einstein’s models of time and space. The idea of space-time as a humongous four-dimensional block in which space and time are sealed together is alluded to in conversations.

However, for readers whose idea of fun doesn’t include trying to wrap their heads around theoretical physics, Goodhand keeps the science to the minimum, keeping the focus on Alex’s desperation to understand what caused his life to devolve into such a trainwreck.

In Alex, James Goodhand creates a relatable character with an innate decency, flecked by weaknesses and insecurities. Like most of us. His relatability and helpless concern for his loved ones makes the reader root for him to overcome his trials which play out like dominoes, each setting off the next.

The Day Tripper's premise lies in physics but its soul rests in ideas that make sense to each of us—cause and effect, regret and the undeniable, compounding impact of small but consistent actions. And how the significance of the forks in the paths of our lives and the choices we make can only be understood in hindsight. As the Danish philosopher Soren Kierkegaard said,

“Life can be only understood backwards, but it must be lived forwards.”

Goodhand brings out these ideas in Alex's conversations with someone who enters his life as an enigmatic stranger. His name is Dr Paul H Defrates. He is aware of Alex’s predicament but isn’t very forthcoming about how much he knows and how. Alex has little option but to trust Defrates given that he is the only person who knows what Alex is going through and could help unravel the mystery.

The Day Tripper is a bit of a slow-starter. It takes a few chapters to understand where Goodhand is going with this. The novel's non-linear structure may also be a bit disorienting for some readers, but it does take the reader along on Alex's confusing journey.

Goodhand uses the metaphor of multiple realities and parallel timelines to talk about destiny, free will and how the future exists even before we live it. This future is dependent on our continuing down the path we’re on. Any deviation from it creates a new future. As Dr Defrates says in the book,

“Before your accident and your trip into the Thames, Alex, you’d have assumed your actions had the ability to change your future? … so we accept that something can already exist, yet be unfixed? … your life, just like mine and everyone’s, exists. But only when a day is lived, does it become observed.”

The Day Tripper is a quick read but one which makes you ponder the value of a day and the power of the choices we make—both quietly constructing the rest of our lives.

I enjoyed reading it and look forward to meeting people who have read it so that we can discuss it in greater detail, spoilers and all. And to achieve exactly such a future, I write this review in my present!