By Vivian Hansen
The Longest Night
by Lauren Carter
Freehand Books (2025)
There are tropes to be observed in the writing of a time-travel novel. The major trope: do not interfere with a time-space continuum; as in ‘if I could go back, I could change the outcome.’ The great writers of time travel fantasy have experimented with this rule. Jack Finney’s Time After Time, and Diana Gabaldon’s Outlander series. Lauren Carter’s The Longest Night offers some new theoretics and perspectives about the genre.
It seems simple enough, and possibly not fantastical at all. Where memory is the location of desire, trauma, apprehension and comprehension, it becomes the portal for travel. In this book, Ash grapples with the joy of seeing long dead relatives again in a new time with new possibilities for change. But she recalls the rules:
All the rules from a glut of science fiction clutter up her head. The prime directive. Don’t interfere in the normal development of a society or the unfolding of a timeline. She’d give anything for Jean-Luc Picard to be in charge right now, to arrive with his fatherly authority and tell her what to do. (99)
I would argue that time travel, as plotted by Lauren Carter, takes down the science fiction and fantasy construct, and leaves it in the theoretic of memoir.
The major tension in this superbly plotted story is situated shortly after the horror of 9/11, and the ensuing questions of how to change the future for a few seemingly unimportant people. Ash is not empowered to change anything about a catastrophic event. Her personal circumstances of surviving sexual abuse and predation have effaced 9/11. The personal catastrophe affects the reality of the universal catastrophe, and this binary opposition is necessary to her own survival and to those whom she loves. She knows the future; she has a memory of it, and when returned to her own drastically altered future, she forgets a little of this, a little of that. The past is eroded; transgressions against her slide away into abyss.
It occurs to me that the sense of MeToo in this work is far more critical than, or sensate with, the horror of nations as exampled in 9/11. If my narrative instincts are correct, Carter has achieved a brilliance that is unimpeded by the violence of patriarchy. Is it not true that the tendency to forget the worst is a female generational problem? Surely Ash, and any of us, do not forget the atrocities of sexual abuse, predation and patriarchal injustice. And yet, we forget a few small things in time, memory and trauma. A little of this, a little of that, until a new generation of women dares to say we’ve grown beyond all that.
This book was a fast page-turner for me, as I absorbed the more subtle drugged-tea offerings that Ash endured, growing into memory/memoir as a site of deferred dreams and un/resolved trauma.
Vivian Hansen’s publications include three full-length books of poetry and several chapbooks. She has published essays in Coming Here, Being Here, and in Waiting. She also has a short piece in the Calgary Public Library Dispenser Series (2019) “Where We Surfaced.”