The novel “The Two-Timers” by Bob Shaw was published for the first time in 1968.
One evening, John Breton receives a strange phone call. He think it’s a prank but his mind goes back to the past, when his wife Kate was attacked and was saved by a stranger who shot the assailant.
Jack Breton spent years with the guilt of having left his wife alone and for that reason she was attacked and killed. Over time, he had strange visions and studying the subject he discovers a way to not only see but also intervene in the past. Jack manages to save his wife but he creates a new timeline and must face his alter-ego to win her back.
“The Two-Timers” introduces a theme used later in other novels by Bob Shaw: mental powers. In this novel, the protagonist Jack Breton suffers from a problem similar to migraine but it turns out to be the ability to see into the past.
Throughout his life, Bob Shaw suffered from migraines and they also caused him vision problems. As he did more than once during his career as a writer, he got inspired to his own experience to make up a mental power which, developed, allows the protagonist to travel through time.
Put that way, “The Two-Timers” might give the impression of being a banal story of a man who finds a way to go back in time to save his wife but Bob Shaw developed his stories very well exploring the consequences of his ideas.
In “The Two-Timers”, when Jack Breton finally manages to go back in time to save his wife and kill the man who wanted to attack her, that’s not the end of the story and problems of the protagonist but rather the opposite.
In fact, Jack Breton’s intervention has the effect of creating a new timeline in which his alter-ego can keep on living with his wife Kate while in the original timeline she’s still dead. As if that wasn’t enough, in the new timeline the marriage started having problems.
The frustration is huge for Jack Breton when he realizes what happened. He can’t move freely in time, so he’s essentially a prisoner of an alternate present quite different from what he had dreamed.
The only option for him is to face his alter-ego and Kate trying to convince his wife that he’d be a better husband than his alter-ego. Most of the novel is developed around this strange triangle and Bob Shaw describes with good depth the protagonists’ thoughts and reactions in addressing a unique situation.
Bob Shaw also develops the character of Blaize Convery, the policeman who investigated the aggression of Kate Breton and the killing of her aggressor. The witnesses who saw the mysterious man who saved Kate described a man identical to Jack Breton but at that moment he was in another place and several witnesses confirmed that.
Blaize Convery believes that there’s something that doesn’t add up in the story and though the investigation is officially closed he remains obsessed by it. Bob Shaw tells only part of Convery’s investigation while he describes his personality, explaining how he could be haunted for years by an investigation officially closed.
The story of Jack / John and Kate Breton isn’t enough and Bob Shaw outlines the unintended consequences of the intervention that created the new timeline on the whole world. Initially, only details that seem disconnected from the story are supplied but they turn out to be important in the second part of “The Two-Timers”.
In my opinion, “The Two-Timers” is a good novel in which Bob Shaw develops well the basic idea. By today’s standards it’s a very short novel: just over one hundred pages focused on the important elements of the story. Given the theme, the plot can’t linear but it’s not unnecessarily complicated. For these reasons I recommend reading it.
