Space Hopper
by Helen Fisher
Simon & Schuster
Faye considers herself to be an ordinary thirty-something mother with two daughters and a husband who is training to be in the clergy … which is interesting as Faye doesn’t share her husband’s faith in a god. Then a photograph falls out of her mother’s favourite cookbook.
Adopted by neighbours after her mother died of a mystery illness when she was the age her children are now, Faye is mesmerised by the image of her seven year-old self sitting in a Space Hopper box on Christmas morning.
As her mother was gone by the following Christmas, she only has fleeting memories of her and “they are like butterflies”. Fragile, floating into her vision and out again before she is able to get a proper look. Now that she is a mother herself, she longs for the lost moments.
Faye finds the battered Space Hopper box in the attic with all the stuff that should have been thrown out, but are not because of the memories attached to them. In a totally unbelievable and extraordinary turn of events, she finds herself back in the 1970s seeing her mother – “flesh and blood, tea-and-biscuits-on-the-table-visiting”.
The reader willingly suspends disbelief as Faye makes the big jump to fulfill her wishes to go back in time to observe the small things about a mother and ask some questions. Of course parallels are drawn between the faith and trust in an unseeable god, about believing in the unbelievable!
The rules of time travel are somewhat nebulous and the jaunts back in time, that she is keeping secret form her husband, could have disastrous consequences including that Faye could be certified as being totally crazy. Fortunately her gay best friend Louis becomes her ally as she comes to terms with the blanks in her past and acknowledges that some things will always be beyond your reach.
This life-affirming tale is a bumpy roller-coaster ride that is ultimately about being able to live in the present and have faith in the future.
Lezly Herbert
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