Paris Adrift May Be the First Time Travel Bildungsroman

E.J. Swift’s inventive time travel novel Paris Adrift seems to start in this vein. We are introduced to a semi-sentient time anomaly somewhere in Paris, who (which?) has an apparent desire to insinuate itself into everything. We also meet a group of time travelers, huddled in a burning future-Paris, maybe half a millennium from now. The nuclear winter is upon them, and it won’t be much longer before everything and everyone is dead, permanently and forever. The time travelers more or less draw straws, and send one of their number back to 2017 with a mission to nudge a specific person toward that Parisian anomaly. This individual will then (hopefully) enact the shifts in history necessary to obliterate our obliteration.
At this point I settled in for a novel of time-trotting temporal engineering, wherein a young English woman, Hallie, moves to Paris, falls into the anomaly, and works her way through time, throwing a spanner into the engine that will lead to doom. But was not the novel I got, and more’s the better.
Hallie is on a gap year of a sort when she comes to Paris, running from an inevitable confrontation with her family and her future. She’s about 20, and smack in the middle of the existential crisis that hits so many at that age. (Though she’s no moody philosopher; that position being taken up by her friend Dušanka.)
Our time traveler Léon, who we recognize from the future-set prologue, is the one who nudges Hallie toward work at a bar called Millie’s, just down the street from the Moulin Rouge on Place de Clichy. (Léon will factor into the plot in other ways too, though not really until the third act.) Millie’s is peopled with a panoply of castoffs and rejects, travelers and oddments. Hallie doesn’t do so great on her first day, which also ends up being her first interaction with the anomaly hiding out in the bar’s keg room, but it doesn’t take long for her to fall into the steady rhythm of serving drunk tourists, drinking too much herself, straying up too late, and generally having the kind of life that seems like crap when you’re living it, but will spark with youth and friendship once you’re old and nostalgic.
Her time traveling ends up flowing along in a similar vein: she ends up back in a Paris of the late 1800s, then in the 1940s under German occupation, but her sojourns feel more experiential than directed. I mean, sure, she’s tasked to get this one architect not to build this one specific building, but the reality is, she must also live and work and get by in these past Parises, sometimes for months, forging friendships and interacting with the locals. Not unlike what she’s doing in the Paris of the present, if in a half-avoidant, half-embracing manner, in many ways living fully in the now in order to avoid both the past and the future.
Hallie’s half-finished degree is in geology, and the punctuated equilibrium of the geological record ends up a salient metaphor for the strangely static upheaval taking place in herlife in Paris, as she is acted upon and acting for the time anomaly down in the keg room. I don’t feel like I’ve seen time travel used this way before, exactly: as a frame narrative for coming of age, in that hard period before you’ve dealt with your origins, left wheel-spinning in the present with no traction or direction. Paris Adrift is something like a bildungsroman with time travel, or a love letter to Paris, or both of those things at once.
Paris Adrift is available now.