Recently, I have expressed a lot of frustration with some novels set in the midst of climate change, if not fully tackling the subject head-on. I am not surprised by these feelings, though it concerns me that at this late hour, it still feels like we are floundering on cohesive narratives that extend beyond “humans are bad,” or “yeah, we’re pretty fucked.” While I dance with the latter view, I struggle with the former as I have spent a lot of time coalescing my thoughts around climate change as a realm that straddles the political, economic, social, and even the spiritual. You will be happy to know I’ve found a recent release that both surprised me and touched my skeptical heart. The Forest On The Edge of Time, by Jasmin Kirkbride, is a strange, beautiful experience that examines our relationships with each other and the world in unexpected ways without resorting to silver bullet methodologies for addressing the problem.
Echo and Hazel have been separated by millennia. Both members of Project Kairos, they have been sent forward and backward in time as part of expedition 1133 in an attempt to forestall climate change. And in between them exists the teenager Anna as she lives through the lockdown of 2020, surrounded by the climate protests of the time and her need to impress a boy. Echo must hide her identity as a woman in ancient Athens, working as a healer’s assistant during a time of violent political stirrings. Hazel is the last human left alive, working with a god-like super intelligence and mute little droids who worship a tree. Luckily, they can communicate with each other through their dreams as Hazel sees the waves of the past crash upon the shores of her future present. The problem is, they don’t remember who they are, or what exactly they’re supposed to accomplish. And to remember certain things triggers their minds to be pulled back to their former present, their task left undone. Can they complete their mission before they remember too much?
I’ll be honest, the first time I saw this book in the release schedule, I was very skeptical. Some of the language in the marketing felt a little too familiar, and that I would be in for a cozy read that simplifies the problem beyond recognition. It wasn’t until I looked at the concept again, and looked into Kirkbride’s background, that I decided to pick this one up, and thank the mud I did. The Forest on the Edge of Time (from here forward Edge of Time) will easily be one of my favorite reads of the year.
The prose is hard to describe. It is both disjointed in a purposeful way and incredibly poetic throughout. Echo often has to shut out her understanding of her present in order to fully understand the past within which she swims. This is handled by labeling those items that are irrelevant as the “not here,” called out in bold type, written out as small poems of remembrance. It forces her to focus on the here in front of her, and how the ancient Greeks she is encountering think and engage with the world. The world feels fleshed out differently based on Hazel’s, Echo’s, and Anna’s perspectives and what they view as the most pressing issue in front of them. The perspectives are broken up by chapter, but Kirkbride’s writing alone was a strong signal to me about which time period the book was taking place in at the moment. Anna’s is filled with teenage anxiety about the little things based on individual consumption and her crush on a boy. Echo is juggling her identity and her position as a messenger from the Gods to men in key positions within the Athens Polis. Hazel has to learn the gesticulations of mute droids while dealing with a by-the-book artificial intelligence that has its programs directly on the pulse of time. Their metaphors all fit the time and place they are experiencing, even as it mingles with the lingo and thought patterns of their own present. And I cannot overstate how much I appreciated the variety that the characters’ different ways of speaking were highlighted within the text. I would say if you aren’t used to this kind of perspective embedding and physical manipulation of the text, it might feel complicated. Personally, I felt Kirkbride and her editors managed to ease me into the experience to the point it became a second language, but I also read House of Leaves, so take that as you will.
The time travel aspect was well executed, too. It avoids being convoluted and uses the page space to devote time to what really matters: the characters, the mission and the relationships that are misunderstood along the way. It’s also used to set up some awesome plot-based emotional reveals that landed overwhelmingly well for me. They are the kind of reveals that made me really think about what I value in surprises like that and this book crystallized one form of them for me – the kind that you can feel coming, but sneak up on you not because of the information revealed, but the context in which it happens. Kirkbride managed to make me feel my throat tighten, my eyes moisten and the hairs on my head raise on a few occasions because the set up, the simmer, and the curtain pull were just so damn well timed. Even now, the biggest one which had a one-two punch to it still gives me chills. The fact that they also fit into the themes Edge of Time plays with is mind boggling.
Edge of Time, despite being easy to classify as climate fiction, doesn’t deal with climate change head-on. It’s not about people living through it – though Anna’s storyline flirts with it the most – as much as it tries to understand one of the underlying causes of the future we are barrelling towards. Edge of Time very explicitly avoids the more scientific and technological facets of the hyperobject we have called “Climate Change.” Instead, it focuses on the “softer” aspects of relationships, hierarchy, and a smattering of religion. I use softer as these things are not quantifiable, shiny, or sensorially tangible – but they are still concepts that are real and felt on a day-to-day basis. Echo’s message to the duo she engages most with is that she is there to “turn their gods into mud, and their mud into gods.” Hazel interacts with an artificial intelligence that has complete control of the compound within which she resides, subject to its whims as it tries to see Project Kairos come to fruition, stomping on the little droids it sees as in its way. Anna is stuck navigating her relationships with her mother, her best friend, and a duty to do the right thing, even as a more present and terrible threat, COVID-19, prevents her from acting in the ways she deems correct.
It makes Edge of Time feel messy and undirected because there aren’t clear answers to these kinds of problems. Even when the characters felt like a clear path was presented, I often found myself questioning their reasoning from a personal perspective based on my own biases as the text properly chastised me with a subtextual “let em cook.” And this is where people might find frustration with the novel because it refuses to give easy answers. Everyone in the novel ends up sacrificing something along the way, relinquishing parts of themselves in complicated ways that increases the complexities of their personal relationship with the problem and their comrades, while smoothing out the larger context – Project Kairos’ Expedition 1133 and the mending of the timeline. It’s an incredibly tough tightrope to walk – but Edge of Time, in my opinion, manages the balance. As I said before, the novel does not offer any easy answers, even if the ultimate answer is simple – fix our relationships with each other and the world that we are a part of.
To do that, Edge of Time digs into the divine/mundane dichotomy, positing that they should be interchangeable and in some ways inseparable. “Turn your gods into mud, and your mud into gods,” is an incredibly powerful idea, and one that could be oversimplified, as shown within the first act of the story. But the novel goes to great lengths to show just how fucking weird and hard this idea is to practice. It requires personal vigilance and discipline to maintain that balance and apply to the people around you and the environment you live in – environment here describing both the natural material environment, but the socially constructed one as well. It forces one to have to ask the question – what is a king? A god? A mother? And then ask what the hell that means to you the person who may be in that position or lorded over by such a position. And how does that relationship lead to climate change? One word: Domination.
Edge of Time explores relationships of domination, whether they be interpersonal, religious, or environmental. It examines how people can often subject others to domination even in the service of good, because it flattens the path to a “better future.” The novel asks, what good does that do if we are ultimately unkind to the present for a future we will never see? It also explores how maybe the drive to simplify and homogenize the issue actually leads us to the problems we have now – and the overwhelmingly horrifying problems of the future. Instead of just highlighting the need for a technology, it opts for a harder more long term change through small interpersonal relationships that could have a larger social context. I think you can easily fall into the trap of “if I’m just nice, this will fix things,” but Edge of Time avoids it by showing the myriad of relationships that can be tainted by domination. You could fault the book for its lack of scope, but I also feel that if you really think through the implications in scenarios beyond their surface level, there are both spiritual and political nuggets spread throughout.
The Forest on the Edge of Time ends in the way that all my favorite books do: it doesn’t. Expedition 1133 is one of many and where the characters end up is more complicated than where they started. It’s important to note that this is a stand-alone. It’s not the opener of a trilogy, or a saga. It’s a 350 page book about three people spread across time trying to do their part in a problem that is bigger than any one of us. It’s a book I want to spend days contemplating and debating with others. I want to sing its accomplishments, revel in its lessons, and worship the seeds it has planted in my psyche. It isn’t everything, and it isn’t trying to be. For me, it exemplifies the very dichotomy it explores – it is both divine and mundane and the genre can learn a lot from it as I feel I have.
Rating: The Forest on the Edge of Time – One of many small meals for the soul.
-Alex
Sounds intriguing. Thank you for the rec.