The Tourist by Robert Dickinson (book review).
With Robert Dickinson’s novel, ‘The Tourist’, you are thrown in at the deep end and have to work out what is going on from the start. There is Spens, a female prisoner in isolation whose crime you aren’t really informed of but she’s been there a long time. A few chapters in, you discover that she killed someone in a time travel trip into the past. The current authorities now need Spens for another trip as someone is missing in one of the time zones she frequented. She is accompanied by Riemann Aldis and, if successful, might actually be finally released. That’s the plot in a nutshell but struggles to stay with it.
The time travel trope of time tourists going missing isn’t new neither. Unfortunately, ‘The Tourist’ is a bit of a mess. You barely get glimpses of the different time zones and, a lot of the time, its swamped in dialogue and there is no sense of what is really going on and I’m still puzzling over what conspiracy there is from the title. It’s all pretty writing but the plot really gets lost. You come away from this hoping something has been done but, well and truly, I really was no wiser when I got to the end.
GF Willmetts
October 2016
(pub: Orbit. 283 page hardback. Price: £12.99 (UK). ISBN: 978-0-356-50815-3)
check out website: www.orbitbooks.net