Narrative Conceit
The opening paragraphs of the book establish the conceit for the narrative structure. The book is structured as a series of journal entries by the protagonist, Jackson Meyer, which details his experiences in time travel. This was not his idea. The implicit message is that Jackson doesn’t burn as the brightest bulb on Broadway:
“Tonight, I finally let someone in on my secret. Someone whose IQ is light-years above mine, so basically he might actually be able to figure me out. The one request Adam insists I follow is documentation.”
“What’s Tempest?”
Fortunately, this is an actual question that is addressed by Jackson to another character. And, also fortunately, that character doesn’t try to be cutely ambiguous with the answer. Though, admittedly, he does engage a metaphorical image as the primary foundation of his answer:
“That’s my division … of the CIA … your dad’s, too. We’re sort of the bottom layer. People know about us, they’ve heard the name Tempest, but unless you’re in this division, you don’t know what we do.”
Holly
Holly is the romantic target of the narrator’s interest. She is also a big time plot mechanism. So, basically, she’s a pretty big deal in the story. And yet, one of the most elegantly subtle examples of metaphor kind of sums up their relationship at a point in time when she doesn’t even know who he is:
“Her light laughter rang through my ears and I had the sudden urge to throw her over my shoulder and run out of there. Make sure nothing bad ever happened to her."
Something About 2007
There is something about 2007 for this particular time traveler. He keeps being slung backward or forward to that year. A strange choice considering it was not exactly one of those years where the world changed. The last truly great year for movies like 1939 and 1980, but aside from that, hardly the stuff of metaphorical Armageddon:
“With all the attempts, I ended up in some random past date. Then I came back here. As if there’s nothing in the future. Like September 9, 2007, is THE END OF THE WORLD.”
Cheesiness
The big bad of the novel are a secretive cabal of intelligence agents that are collectively identified with the term “Enemies of Time.” Unfortunately, neither the narrator nor the author seem to comprehend the elevated level of cheesiness associated with this term. The closest anyone connected with the story comes to getting it is the following whine served with the cheese:
“So, basically, the Enemies of Time are evil sociopaths, and Tempest agents are the equivalent of Mother Teresa. Not very original.”
