fullybooked2017

There are two parallel narratives, one being that of present day Beth McDade, and the other being the views and experiences of Owen Slader. On that February night he was engulfed by what appears to be a lightning storm and, when he recovers his senses, the freeway no longer exists, and he is stranded near the primitive and rumbustious silver mining settlement of Calico. And it is 1882. Slader hides his hired Mercedes in a cave, rigs up a solar battery charger to power his iPhone and, using his 21st century culinary skills, caries out a profitable life for himself cooking up delicacies for the hungry miners of Calico. He meets – and marries another refugee from another time, a woman called Wendy, but she was ‘taken’ by the Time Gods a couple of decades earlier than Slader. This is when the complexities and total unknowables of the time travel concept begin to cause brain hurt, and the obvious questions like the one below, can never be answered:
“If stamps on the titanium implants found in the bones within the ancient coffin identify the recipient as Owen Slader who, identifying as Ben Cartwright (1960s TV Western reference!), died in the early 1900s, how did he then father a daughter in the early decades of the 21st century?”

The author certainly has fun with some of the more bizarre aspects of being a time traveller. He has Ben Cartwright buying copies of new novels by writers like Mark Twain and Robert Louis Stevenson knowing that (as first editions) they will become immensely valuable decades ahead. When a cholera epidemic hits Calico, Cartwright, nursing the town judge in what seems to be his final fevered moments, takes out his iPhone and plays the dying man some music. Problem is, the judge doesn’t die, and when he recovers he goes around loudly humming ‘Somewhere Over The Rainbow.’

Meanwhile, Beth McDade struggles to reconcile facts that are, at the same time, impossible but also incontrovertible. She even finds, boarded up in a cave, the 2019 rental that Owen Slader was driving when he disappeared. It is, needless to say, improbably decayed and weathered given that it can only have been there a matter of months. Eventually, our heroine tackles – and bests –  the FBI and the implacable American military machine.

Lee Goldberg’s audacious plot and premise will not be for everyone, particularly those who think that Hamlet’s famous remark to Horatio was just the rambling of a confused and conflicted young man. Of course, time travel novels are nothing new, and Goldberg does nod in homage to the grand-daddy of the genre, Herbert George Wells, but also develops the ‘stepping on a butterfly’ trope that began with Ray Bradbury’s 1952 short story ‘A Sound of Thunder’. Key question, though. Does Lee Goldberg’s book work? Of course it does. The writer is also an experienced screenwriter, producer and TV executive, far too well versed in his trade to stretch  the credulity of his readers and viewers to beyond breaking point. Calico is immensely entertaining, with a runaway-train narrative drive. Published by Severn House, it came out in hardback and Kindlle in November 2023 and this paperback edition was published on 4th July.