Saturday, September 02, 2006

Can The Time Traveller's Wife be geekily correct?

Finally I have finished The Time Traveller's Wife. If you're planning on reading it, or are in the middle of this novel and not finished yet, you may want to skip the rest of this post because it's going to contain spoilers. (You might also want to skip the rest of this post if you've got this far and are bored already).

One thing about this story - it's really quite sad and depressing. Poor Claire seems to spend practically her whole life waiting for Henry to come back from whenever he is. Just before he dies, he tells her to get on with her life once he's gone. Then he tells her that he'll appear to her when she's about 82 years of age. What a bloody horrible thing to do to her - what kind of man willingly causes his loving wife to put her life on hold for thirty-odd years, waiting for the next time she'll meet him?

Then there's this other thing that is bugging me - One of Claire's artist friends talks about her latest exhibition. Apparently this friend creates computer viruses, then exhibits the HTML code. Now, I couldn't write a computer virus if someone put a gun to The Little Madam's head, but I'm pretty sure that you can't write a computer virus using HTML. HTML isn't even a computer language - all it does is make web pages look nice. Or am I talking out of my rectum?

6 comments:

Kazzer said...

I loved this book and cried my eyes out. I asked Taffy about the HTML and he says you are right. However, he says that HTML can contain Java script. Microsoft's JScript can invoke objects installed on the machine. So it may be possible to do some dodgy stuff with it, but Taffy's not heard of any viruses like that.
p.s Violet, you are still a geek,
I'm afraid.

Angela said...

I read that book too and it just seemed so wrong to make your wife wait for you that long. On top of that he was dead. I would say so sad for my dead husband and move on with my life. Oh well if he is alive for two seconds thirty years or more in the future. In reality he is dead. Yes I would miss him. When the time travelor came back it was such a short time too. That book made me feel like life is shorter than it actually is. You know going from age I think six to like eighty in a matter of a few pages. I hope my life story is a little longer than that one.

darth said...

loved that book, although its too sad to re-read it.

oh, and i found a book for you, coming out in december:

http://www.jenniferouellette-writes.com/Buffyverse.html

Violet said...

kazzer: if you asked the boy, he certainly wouldn't agree with you. Due to my known (to him) history with all things electronic and computerised, I am more like the Anti-Geek.

angela: conversely, the book made Henry's life seem never-ending because he gets to travel to his post-death future so much.

darth: ooh, that sounds almost as interesting as Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Philosophy!

Ms Mac said...

I wasn't overwhelmed by this book eiter and because of silly reason that seemed like there wasn't quite enough thought put into which made it seem rushed.

By the way, I've been leaving comments but they've been going missing!

:-(

Violet said...

ms mac: your comments are going missing? That's weird. I wonder whether anyone else has had the same problem.