Review: Time to Remember

Natalie is a driven second-year journalism student. Serious, a teetotaller in a world of beer pong and parties, she’s single-minded in her pursuit of a journalism career. Her boyfriend Aidan is the editor of student newspaper Canta, which gives her a somewhat advantageous position when it comes to setting her own assignments. Josh, her journalism tutor and rival, is understandably ruffled by Natalie’s influence but there’s something underlying his brutal hostility that Natalie can’t understand.

It’s not until Natalie proposes a tribute to the Canterbury earthquakes anniversary that Josh’s malignancy reaches its peak. Her idea is to speak to those who were children during the earthquakes, now young adults at university. The children were never asked for their stories, she explains, but they’re grown-up now and deserve a platform for their experiences. What she’s not prepared for is the intensity of some of the stories and the emotional impact they still have for those who experienced them. She encounters fear, grief, sadness - and ferocious anger, as Josh tries in vain to prevent his scars from being reopened.

This theme of former children coming to awareness and adulthood, the wrench of innocence lost and the tentative joy of new beginnings, is the key to Time to Remember. The interest and action centres around the relationships forming between young people, the difficulties of negotiating love, sex, friendship and vocation in this formative period of life. Between the late teens and early twenties, in the crucible of a university experience, the gamut of emotion is played out. A world that exists only between flats, the student magazine office and lectures, without the influence of “adultier” adults or family, it’s an artificially concentrated environment and produces drama accordingly.

Current and former alumni will recognise what Janna Ruth has captured: that unique social episode in which every wavering emotion seems intensely eternal and crucial, every detail of life urgent and significant. This will resonate most effectively with readers in the same stage of life as the characters.

But there are areas where you might expect the book to delve deeper. Students date their own tutors and, indeed, their lecturers, without much interrogation of power imbalances or harassment. Natalie’s relationship with her editor Aidan and later with her tutor Josh (both older post-graduate students) are only depicted as complicated due to their various bad behaviours.

The tumultuous present and uncertain future of journalism is another area untouched. The students seem to assume a career in writing is a given, despite closures and redundancies across New Zealand’s media landscape. Fake news and the intricacies of political and journalistic rhetoric in the last few years are similarly unexplored. Covid-19, which arose after the first draft was written and was incorporated later, feels like a resented intruder, dealt with summarily.

This is a novel interested primarily in the emotional processes of its subjects, rather than the social and professional context in which they operate. At its heart it is a romance, a story of young love that stands for the potential good - but not uncomplicated good - that can arise from tragedy. Janna Ruth’s treatment of the earthquake anniversary draws powerfully on the very real impact of the event. She examines the poignancy of what is lost by making it specific to each story. Some stories are of wild, deep grief that can’t be softened by the years passing. All share trauma though, and Natalie tries to bring that pain into the healing light of day when she insists that it is time for them all to remember.

Reviewed by Ruth Spencer