A holiday, with its siren’s call of renewal, its graspings at something outside of us, is fertile ground for fiction; a new environment tends to accentuate people’s natures. A vacation in Indonesia was the backdrop to Luke Horton’s compelling debut novel, The Fogging, which traced the slow unravelling of a couple’s relationship. Now, in Time Together, a seemingly relaxing beach trip probes at ageing, parenthood, relationships and grief.
Phil, whose ill mother has recently died, has invited some old friends to stay with him at his parents’ coastal home while his father is away. There’s no-nonsense Jo and her Marxist-reading husband Lucas; the highly strung Bella and her dad-joke-incarnate partner Tim; and the beautiful Annie, recently single after leaving a bad relationship. On the cusp of middle age, these friends have weathered the decades, with their gathering a reunion of sorts: they’ve meant to keep in touch around the bustle of relationships and raising a family – an entourage of young children attend the holiday too – but the years have slipped by.
Time Together is narrated from the alternating points of view of Phil, Bella, Tim and Annie, with Horton moving fluidly among them. As the holiday stretches on, we witness the stripping effect of prolonged time spent between old friends who were once inseparable, now scattered. Flawed assumptions and dormant grievances are exposed, as well as a sense of self forgotten to time and circumstance. Horton writes authentically of this intimate interplay of warring insecurities, nostalgias and unrealised aspirations.
However, Horton doesn’t manage to evoke the same granular psychological detail as he did in The Fogging, the sole protagonist of which was compellingly vivid. In Time Together, having multiple narrators dilutes things, a blurriness exacerbated by a persistent, vague orbiting of meaning – Phil enjoys the kids’ company “for some reason”; Tim reflects “there was something about” the early morning light; Annie can’t “put into words” why Phil’s mannerisms encapsulate him perfectly. This may speak to these friends’ shared feelings of estrangement, but it also means it takes a while for Phil, Bella, Tim and Annie to materialise.
Cutting through this is Horton’s restrained, crisp writing, so unadorned with superfluity that his simple descriptions of nature and light resonate: “It was a sky so uniformly blue, it felt less a clear view of the infinite and more the lid of a great dome that was closed over them.” There are moments, though, when an occasional uninspired image – Phil’s ageing body feeling as if “his entire skeleton was jolting in his skin” – disrupts the book’s otherwise illustrative storytelling. Elsewhere, too, well-intended references to First Nations culture and history read more like sensitivity to optics rather than meaningful engagements.
Time Together takes a while to find its footing, but it culminates in a compelling rendering of personal and interpersonal tensions and the subterranean currents that shape them. Without sentimentality, Horton tenderly evokes the at times quiet, opaque nature of grief, drawing subtle threads between Phil’s mourning of his mother as well as a version of himself relegated to memory. The nihilism that can arise after a parent’s death, too, is sketched with poignant restraint: “That love used to be a constant,” Phil says. “Humming away in the background. Always there. Now gone. The world is that much more indifferent to me now.”
In a lesser novel, these characters may have succumbed to revelation while on holiday, but Horton is more interested in the interminable struggle of sloughing off our ghosts and not haunting our children the same. Natures are difficult beasts to tame, and to bend them otherwise is to misunderstand them, to tell ourselves a fairytale. As Bella remarks: “Maybe that was part of the problem – our need to make everything a stupid story, to narrativise, when really all this wasn’t a ‘story’ at all. It was something else altogether.”
Ultimately, change is not the point of Time Together. Early in the book, Tim goes to look for two of the children down by the beach and observes a swimmable channel: “It seemed not to be running fast. The surface was still. But he knew beneath the surface strong currents ran out to sea.” It’s the perfect metaphor for the surging rapids beneath us – the version of ourselves we project and behind which we’re never truly known, even by those closest to us.
Time Together by Luke Horton is out now in Australia (Scribe, $34.99)
