We launched Time Squared this week, and during a Q&A, Elizabeth Renzetti asked a challenging question. She asked a series of them—Liz being, of course, an award-winning Globe and Mail columnist as well as an author herself. Check out her wonderful essay collection, Shrewed. 

But I’m thinking of one question in particular. Why is Robert Denholm always a soldier, no matter when the story takes place?

Time Squared is an exploration of the roles of women throughout history. It’s also a time travel novel. As we discussed at the Dora Keogh pub in Toronto–an actual in-person launch!–the characters keep jumping eras. As the book progresses, we move from the England of 1812, during the Napoleonic Wars, to the Vietnam War in the U.S. Our heroine, Eleanor Crosby, comes to understand that she’s a pawn in someone’s game, being manipulated through time. This is the underlying mystery in the novel, and one Eleanor has no road map for solving, not at first: Who is doing this to her and why? 

Whoever it is, they’re doing it to both Eleanor and to Robert, her fiancé. Times change, but as Liz Renzetti notes, Robert is always a soldier, whether he’s an officer and a gentleman in the British Army or a Marine deployed to ‘Nam. Robert is unaware of the time jumps, along with everyone else in Eleanor’s life. They believe they’ve always lived in Regency England or mid-century New York, wherever each new section opens. None of them is troubled by the dreams and flashbacks and unsettling memories that plague Eleanor—glimpses of other times that finally force her to confront the chessmasters who are using her as a pawn, bargaining to be freed into normal life. 

Robert is plagued by something else. War. Why did I make the poor man so persistently a soldier, Liz asked, suffering in the trenches of the First World War or taking a bullet to the leg in Mosul?

Part of the reason is technical. Jumping characters around in time risks making a story difficult to follow. This means I constructed a basic, classic, storyline to carry us forward. Girl meets boy. Romance ensues. So do obstacles. Will they get together in the end? 

I also kept the characters’ interests and professions both consistent and timeless. Robert is always a soldier going to war. And as one of the characters says, “There will always be another war,” and that gives consistency to the action as well. Eleanor’s best friend Kate is always an artist, whether she paints amateur watercolours during the Regency or increasingly-sophisticated oils in 20th century New York. And Eleanor’s Aunt Clara loves clothes, remaking old dresses from the attic in times of scarcity or setting herself up as a high-level fashion designer in more modern times. 

But why a soldier? Here I told Liz that my father was in the Canadian army during the Second World War, and that he often manages to make his way into my writing. So there’s a bit of psychology behind the characterization, some deep wellspring feeding the choice that goes beyond technique.

In fact, when I go even deeper into the wellspring, I realize that the returning soldier is a central figure in my writing. Odysseus, coming home from war. In one of the Time Squared chapters set during the First World War, Eleanor and Robert attend an exhibition of paintings done by an artist not long back from the front. The artist, David, is recuperating from his injuries, which are severe enough that he won’t be sent back to the trenches, although he’s still angling to return.

“Eleanor walked beside Robert, stopping at one canvas that showed stretcher-bearers carrying a wounded Tommy. Robert kept moving, and after a brief look, she followed him to an image of ambulances moving away from the viewer, ant-like men marching beside them. The next showed ruined houses that on closer examination were functioning as billets with clothes hung out the windows, or maybe blown out the windows, or maybe those weren’t just clothes. Here was David returning to all that in his paintings. It made her think of Odysseus visiting the underworld, the ghost of Tiresias appearing and saying, ‘Why, poor man, have you left the light of day and come down to visit the dead in this sad place?’”

Odysseus and his odyssey have ended up being a central myth in my own life, and central to my writing. My poor father suffered badly overseas, sustaining both physical and emotional injuries that only got worse as time passed. Today we would probably say that he suffered from PTSD. He was a messenger riding motorcycles at speed over the cobbled roads of England, which ruined his back; a gunner during the Battle of Britain, which damaged his hearing. He fought at Ortona in Italy, a horrific battle that Farley Mowat wrote about in And No Birds Sang. It ruined both Farley Mowat’s nerves and my poor father’s. 

Not long after Ortona, my Dad got hepatitis and was shipped to a field hospital in North Africa, where he contracted malaria as well. He heard doctors saying that he wouldn’t live, sick with two serious diseases, racked with fever, six-foot-two and down to 120 pounds. After being sent home–five years after he went overseas–my father found his first marriage in tatters. He later told us that he attempted suicide, trying to asphyxiate himself in the garage by leaving a car running. His own father pulled him out or I wouldn’t be writing this. 

My Dad was a very large figure in my life. Well, parents always are. He’s been dead for thirty years, but he keeps showing up in my writing. I wrote my first (unpublished, dreadful) novel between the ages of 17 and 22, and it was set in a veteran’s hospital after the Second World War. I knew nothing about such a serious subject, but also a great deal. Some years after the war, my father had visited Shaughnessy Veteran’s Hospital in Vancouver to see an old army buddy who hadn’t made it out of care. My mother was a nurse there. They married three months later.

And while my first published novel is narrated by a journalist, not a soldier, he’s a former war correspondent who worked in Central America. Hugh Bruce has always felt compelled to return years later to the sites of battles he witnessed, hoping to fight off his nightmares with scenes of peace. The action in Poor Player is woven around Hugh’s insistence on returning to the place in rural Mexico where he found a boy’s murdered body. Unfortunately, drugs are grown in the mountains above, whole plantations of export-quality weed. So there’s Hugh and his trauma, and there’s the fate of the friends he takes with him. Speaking of psychology.

In Time Squared, Robert is more fortunate than most of my warriors. He isn’t a badly-damaged man. In fact, I let him off pretty easily. I hope he’s attractive: humorous, self-deprecating, intelligent and ultimately dependable, something of a reward for Eleanor during her long trials. 

Let him off pretty easily, I say. As we approach the end, something happens during Rob’s peacekeeping stint in Mali, he won’t say what. I think Eleanor will help him heal after the novel ends. I think they’ll be fine. We need happy endings these days, and I hope this is one. 

Photo credit: Deborah Kimmett. With thanks!