A few years ago, DomA posted this review of Spanish author Félix J. Palma's international bestseller, "The Map of Time". It took me three years to get around to it, but now I finally did. I won't bother going over the same ground as Dom, so I'd recommend that anyone who is potentially interested read his review as well.

There is much to like about this novel - Palma picks up on a number of different trends in contemporary novels, such as the Victorian setting of the story, the combining of sci-fi elements (time travel) with a "real world" storyline, and a postmodern love of referencing other books and inserting "meta" elements into the story. All of them elements that I personally like, and some of my favourite books ever combine several of those (e.g. Michel Faber's magnificent "The Crimson Petal and the White".

And sure enough, I had plenty of fun with the first few hundred pages, focusing on a spoiled rich Londoner in the 1880s who falls in love with a prostitute, only to have her end up as the last victim of Jack the Ripper. But then things got bogged down, and remained that way for quite some time before reaching a somewhat more satisfying final act that still didn't quite fulfill the early promise of the book.

Reading Dom's review, who clearly enjoyed the book far more, I do get the idea that quite a number of subtler things went over my head - partially due to me reading the book in Spanish and missing some of the finer nuances, partially also due to my limited familiarity with the writers who Palma is parodizing. And I'm not a huge fan of satire anyway, or at least not whole books of it. Nevertheless, I'm inclined to say that the flimsiness of the romantic subplots (which take up a lot of space all the same), as well as the bizarre pacing of the plot in which about two thirds of the novel seems to be wasted on ultimately irrelevant subplots, are real and significant flaws.

For fans of time travel, yes, you do get some of the seeming or real paradoxes and complicated storylines that characterize the genre, but for the most part they are concentrated in barely a hundred pages near the end of a 650-page novel, and I'm not inclined to say they were particularly insightful or revolutionary. For fans of other genres that this book touches upon at some point, the message is similar - ultimately it's not very rewarding, and you might well wonder if you're not better off reading a few of the 1890s novels parodized or referred to in the book (Dracula, The Time Machine, The Invisible Man, The Turn of the Screw,...) instead.

There are many fun parts in this book, it was certainly an entertaining enough way of practicing my Spanish reading skills, but on the whole I was disappointed, and I don't think I will bother with the sequels (it's the first in a trilogy, but a loose one, as this book can be read as a stand-alone without any problem).