A World That Used To Be

At times, Charlie Turner wondered if life has any meaning at all, or were we just hamsters, traveling on an endless wheel to nowhere or lemmings waiting for our turn to jump off that cliff. Throughout the novel, we see Charlie as a person who is divided within himself by time, as someone who is seeking to get by in the present, while trying to be hopeful for the future, and as pursued by hurtful and unpleasant memories of his past. Some fanciful aspects of the novel include Charlie’s meeting with good and bad angelic manifestations of himself and his former disagreeable boss who had fired him, recollections of his drunken father triggered by the darkness in an electrical power outage, and imagining himself as a lemming going through routine motions like taking its turn jumping off a cliff, which seems as meaningless as many aspects of a person’s life. He believed in the power of love; its power to create, to make things grow, its power to nurture happiness and to cause it to blossom and spring forth from seemingly dead roots of sadness, bitterness, and disappointment. And, as long as there was love, there was hope, and thus, the chance for happiness.