Book Review: Readings

My Dirty Little Book of Stolen Time

by Liz Jensen

Bloomsbury, 305 pp., $23.95

It must be hard to come up with a new conceit for a novel at this late moment in literary history. Liz Jensen is giving it the old college try, however, with her sixth, My Dirty Little Book of Stolen Time. Picking up where Mark Twain, Lewis Carroll, and H.G. Wells left off, Jensen adds a feminine voice to the discourse of time travel by transporting Charlotte Schleswig, a shrewd 19th-century Copenhagen prostitute, to modern-day London, where "even the Mongolians have heard of Johnny Depp!"

It's a clever enough gimmick, although we've seen it before on the page and screen (one recalls Brendan Fraser's exclamations over "Negroes!" in the film Blast From the Past). Jensen's Charlotte is hardly a naïf, though; rather, she is misanthropic, opportunistic, and, at the novel's outset, brazenly lacking in self-awareness. She has convinced herself that she is the daughter of royalty deposited at an orphanage and "adopted" by Fru Schleswig, who is depicted as a mouth-breathing, vacuous glutton. Her delusion is transparent, and there is nothing charming about her misanthropy. When she and her mother are hired to clean the mansion of the imperious and secretive Fru Krak, who may or may not have murdered her husband, their lives change forever – not because of the added income, but because of the abandoned time machine in the basement.

Charlotte is forced to rely on her scrap and opportunism when she lands in London and discovers the fascinating and confusing world of beeping mobiles and flavored condoms, not to mention the love of her life, Fergus. There is, of course, no small measure of crises and escapades, modeled as it is on the 19th-century adventure novel. Charlotte's voice is wry and true to the time period in which she was born, and the bits of modern slang thrown in add a bit of sly humor to the mix. However, the artifice grates before too long, and the reader wishes Jensen would dispense with the ampersands and just write the word "and" already. The conceit is just too precious to be truly enjoyable, despite the presence of a heroine who is anything but a lady.