Valley Girl

The set‑up of Scott Alexander Howard’s debut novel, The Other Valley, is wonderfully simple. His characters live in a world of valleys, each identical in geography but separated from the others by increments of twenty years. Travel to the east, and they will find themselves twenty years in the future. To the west, and they will be twenty years in the past. Residents live their ordinary lives haunted by the possibility that at any moment, if the proper protocols for travel between valleys are not observed, they could blink out of existence: “A person goes west, he interferes, and then new time rolls over him like a wave, leaving nothing behind. It’s as simple and ruthless as that.”

To protect against such outcomes, each valley is governed by a Conseil, which maintains tight controls over the borders and processes requests to travel to either the past or the future. Generally, visits are allowed only in the case of bereavement: a dying man who wants to see his grandchildren, for instance, or a bereaved partner who wants one last look at their spouse.

The Other Valley tells the story of Odile Ozanne, a teenage girl whose ambitions to join the exclusive Conseil training program are derailed when she accidentally catches a glimpse of a pair of visitors from the future and realizes they are the parents of her friend Edme. As their arrival almost certainly means Edme is about to die, Odile is torn between her surging romantic feelings for him and her commitment to the Conseil’s prohibition on interference. She says nothing, but the fallout of this decision has a disastrous effect on her life. Odile grows up to become a border guard — a low-status position where “all the town miscreants ended up”— until a terrifying glimpse into her own future forces her to question whether she should commit what her society views as the ultimate sin: changing the past.

The novel unfolds in three long-drawn-out acts. The first follows Odile and her friends as they deal with the normal challenges of being teenagers on the cusp of adulthood: who likes whom, who got invited to which party, what they will do after graduation. The second skips forward to Odile’s life in the gendarmerie, where she deals with sexism and the endless monotony of patrols and outposts. It is only in the third act that the pieces start to come together and Odile takes account of the wreck her life is becoming. If the Conseil’s policy of non-intervention exists to preserve the world as it is — a world that for Odile and her friends is horrible — why should she respect the prohibition?

Despite the fantastical touches, Howard is a realist, and Odile’s valley is painted in considerable detail. Large sections read like a coming-of-age novel or a Cormac McCarthy tale of life on the border, and since Howard has a plain style and a deft touch for character and scene setting, this approach largely works. The prose is unflashy and occasionally memorable: “My eyelids opened to distant drums, the weary sound of morning.” “The empty weight room stank of oniony sweat.” “Vague dream memories were strewn about my mind as I got up, like isolated puddles proving it had rained.” For dozens of pages at a time, the big-picture questions about time travel fall away, and we’re simply watching Odile go about her business. For some readers, this will doubtless be appealing; the strangeness of Howard’s conceit is softened by the gentle flow of his words.

The Other Valley is, technically, a work of speculative fiction, but rather than going into exhaustive detail about the culture and history of his world, Howard lets the important details float in organically. There is mercifully little of the telegraphic exposition that bedevils so many fantasy and sci‑fi novels. Given how much of the book consists of ordinary days in the lives of its characters, however, Howard’s light touch also raises a lot of somewhat annoying questions. For example, I couldn’t stop wondering about the technology the characters use: there are cars, trucks, and guns, and on the whole Odile’s valley feels a bit early twentieth century. Does this mean there are oil derricks somewhere? Refineries? Mines? One imagines that in such a small world — basically consisting of a single region repeated endlessly through space-time — non-renewable resources would quickly be exhausted. The only productive industry we hear about is a winery (the locals love to drink), and most of the population seems to be employed running shops or working for the government.

Are such questions uncharitable? Perhaps. But the novel’s glacial pace means readers have a lot of time to poke at the world that Howard constructs. When you read a Borges story, you don’t worry what people in the Library of Babel eat; his style communicates from the beginning that such matters are beside the point. In a 300-page novel filled with loving descriptions of landscapes, meals, and social institutions very much like our own, however, the logical construction of the setting feels more important. Howard is clearly interested in how people in the valley live. He describes class divisions and hierarchies, and he paints the Conseil as a slightly authoritarian government. Well, okay: Have there been wars? Have there been revolutions? Does the Conseil maintain its power by regularly erasing the timelines in which it is challenged? Without spoiling the ending, all I can say is that it tantalizes but does not reveal.

I run the risk here of coming across as if I’m criticizing Howard for not writing the book I wish he’d written. That’s not quite my point. Howard was educated as a philosopher, and the philosophical stakes of his story are very clear: humans are creatures of time, and whenever we make a decision, we are essentially erasing all of the possible timelines that would develop if we were to make a different one. What would it be like to live in a world where time — the fourth dimension — is physically present? Where it is possible to move through it in more than one direction? How would that shape our conception of agency and ethical responsibility? This is heady stuff, and the novel is at its best when exploring the implications of this truth for our understanding of history and personal identity.

If The Other Valley were a hundred pages shorter, these philosophical questions might shine more clearly. As it is, I couldn’t help feeling that the book squandered some of its promise. Tighter plotting and more editorial discipline could have made it a truly striking debut.