James Hilton was the author of the best-selling novels Lost Horizon, Goodbye, Mr. Chips, and Random Harvest. These three were his 1930’s pre-WW2 novels and his most successful. Time and Time Again was published in 1953 when Hilton was 52 years old, and it was his final published novel. The story takes place in the time in which it was published, the early 1950’s, and its protagonist, Charles Anderson, is 52 years old, looking back on his life and diplomatic career with a very British outlook that combines measured judgment, some regret, and overall contentment.
It would seem that Charles Anderson is James Hilton to some extent, but the differences are as obvious as the similarities. James Hilton was married and divorced twice and childless. Charles Anderson has a college romance with a lower class Cockney office worker, and later marries and has a son. If the book has a theme or a set of ideas, it’s about those two kinds of relationships: upper middle class and lower class, and fathers and sons. Even though Hilton moved to California, became a screenwriter in Hollywood and an American citizen, the concerns in Time and Time Again are very British.
Anderson is never very sure of his place in society, in the diplomatic corps, and even in his own family. The entire story is told from Charles’ perspective, so we’re never entirely sure whether his insights and evaluations are completely accurate. In fact, Charles, although he knows his own worth and intelligence, is never sure whether his view of life, his own life in particular, is accurate or not, which ends up making him a very endearing character.
I tried to think, while I was reading, of other writers that this book reminded me of. The only one that came to mind is Nevil Shute, who is also very British, with books set in the 1940’s and 50’s. Hilton’s novel has the same sort of gentle, unhurried exploration of British society and British mores and the changes that manifested themselves in the first half of the twentieth century that Shute writes about. Someone wrote that Hilton gives readers an idealistic, unrealistic picture of Britain in his books, and maybe he does in other books. However, Time and Time Again seems realistic in its portrayal of an ordinary, average upper middle class man and how he comes to terms with his own capacities and limitations.
It’s not an exciting read, more contemplative and somewhat thought-provoking. Like the man Charles Anderson, it’s a modest story about a modest Englishman and his interaction with the events and changing culture of the first half of the twentieth century.
