Tourmalin’s Time Cheques

Peter Tourmalin is stuck on a months-long steamship voyage from Australia to England, engaged to a demanding fiancee waiting onshore, and bored beyond reason. When he's offered the chance to deposit his "spare time" in a whimsical Time Bank and withdraw it later, he jumps at the opportunity. Surely an extra hour here or there, banked for a sunnier day, will make the tedium bearable. The trouble begins when he starts cashing those cheques back in London, and discovers that time deposited doesn't return in sequence. A quarter-hour of Mediterranean sunshine might materialize during a dreary November rainstorm. A pleasant evening aboard ship might interrupt a crucial business meeting. The time is his, all right, but fate has a perverse sense of timing. Anstey's 1891 comic fantasy is a sharp satire on Victorian optimism about "life-hacking" existence, wrapped in a light, witty adventure. It asks: what if you could skip the dull parts, only to find them scattered unpredictably across everything you love?