In Time with You

Nieve’s boyfriend Carter is dead – drowned while trying to save her from the river. Her grief and guilt overwhelm her, bringing her life to a standstill. The academic year is about to begin at the school she and her cousin Linden attend, the school for the arts, founded by their great-grandmother and it is their duty to be there to welcome new students, but Nieve cannot face it.

Enter Grandee, the girls’ eccentric maternal grandmother, keeper of sheep and goats, healer, weaver of yarn, manipulator of colour, mystic. When the girls were young she encouraged them to knit blankets whose colours they chose and which told the stories of their lives.  Nieve goes to stay with her to heal, a process which begins when Grandee unravels the last year’s worth of yarn from her blanket and resets time to pre-Carter, her first year at college. Dwyer’s use of magic realism makes the reader work as it alters the structure of time and opens the door to the butterfly effect – change one small thing and everything else changes regardless.

There was some drag in the narrative at this point: Nieve is rooted in her sorrow, distanced from her art, endlessly linking her college life to the memories of her relationship with Carter – who now, of course, has only just met her – and determined that, in this incarnation, he will not die. Momentum is restored when loyalties and attachments begin to form anew and Nieve has to come to terms with two things – Carter and Linden begin to be a couple and she has to acknowledge her attraction to Carter’s best friend Max, who she had always felt hated her.

Art is the conduit between Nieve and Max and it has a significant role in the narrative as a tool for exploration of the truth but also as a medium which is exploited by some as a route to money and fame. The untarnished medium is the mysticism which imbues Grandee and it is her wisdom, knowledge and insight which form a strong groundswell in the story.

Time is the master of the narrative: Dwyer swirls us in and out of scenes with Max and Nieve, advancing, retreating and eventually consummating the relationship.  Nieve is able to let go of her time with Carter, realising that his love lay not with her, but elsewhere, with Alex, the woman he knew as a child and to whom time leads him. In Time with You ends full of the promise of good things to come and is saved from the saccharine by time itself.