Review: Making Sense of Past Time by Lawrence G. Taylor

Review: Making Sense of Past Time by Lawrence G. Taylor 

My rating: 2 of 5 stars

Stories reflecting on the past can be very interesting depending on how they’re told. While I don’t regularly read stories like these, I remember certain ones I read in college surrounding rather intriguing people because they dealt with subjects I wasn’t intimately familiar with. Lawrence G. Taylor’s Making Sense of Past Time allowed me to explore similar ideas, and I found myself interested going in. 

The protagonist Harry Holmes has a background that drew me in, with the narrative jumping back and forth at times from his childhood to adulthood. While this does create interesting situations, I found myself questioning some things about the story’s structure and how one event led to another. 

Before I go any further into that, though, let’s discuss what the story is about. 

Summary

The story opens with a man named Harry Holmes reflecting on his distant past. Through memory, he recounts his life up to this point, bringing the reader on a journey of self-discovery and identity. As Harry tries to navigate his life and fulfill his dream of traveling to America, he realizes that there is more to his life – and his struggle for identity – than he originally thought.  

Thoughts

I admit, I like a lot of the subjects this story is playing with. They are interesting and the narrator draws some thought-provoking conclusions about himself, his past actions, and the world around him. Seeing him go about life and reflect on it from a different place by writing the story makes it easy to see a sense of growth in his character in those reflections. 

The problem, however, is that Harry is the only character whom I feel we get to know in any intimate sense. The narrative is told in first-person limited point of view, but I feel like the narrative should have shown more aspects of other characters. For me, Harry’s recap of some of these characters wasn’t always enough. I’ll discuss the reason for that in the writing section. 

Now that I’ve gotten those general thoughts out of the way, let’s discuss the characters. 

Characters

Harry Holmes 

Harry’s journey has relatable aspects to it, even if I don’t agree with everything he says and does. His reflections on his own life provide greater context for his growth, as he recounts being very young to adulthood. His meditations on people, however, may be a bit shaky. I say this because he meets a lot of people throughout the course of the narrative and doesn’t seem to form any intimate relationships with people that are shown in detail. 

However, I do love his meditations on his past and what they say about him as a person. I think Harry is introspective, meditative, and acknowledges his past actions in ways that make him more sympathetic. His awareness of the impacts of his actions and what they mean is awesome to see. Overall, I think this is what kept me hooked on Harry’s story. I wanted to see how he would continue to grow.

Now that I’ve discussed Harry, let’s move on to his father.

Samuel Holmes 

I don’t see a lot of redeeming qualities in this character. The amount of control he exercised over the family was incredibly unsettling and I absolutely hated how every family member listened to him. The hatred this man showed toward Harry and his own wife was disturbing and hearing Harry admit that he’d learned some of his father’s behaviors made my stomach turn. Every time this man was brought up, I felt uneasy and angry. 

Samuel’s impact on the rest of the family was equally unsettling to watch. What I especially hate about him is the dynamics he set up in the family and how they impact Harry later. Seeing the rest of the family react to the situation the way they did showed just how powerful this man was and what he could do with the influence he had. 

While I hated Samuel as a character, I recognize his role in the story and understand how he influences the plot. 

Overall, these were the two characters that left the largest impact on me, even if it wasn’t always for the best reasons. Now that I’ve discussed characters, let’s move on to the structure. 

Structure

This story employs a technique in its structure that I’ve grown rather fond of, where sections of the narrative are split up. I like when this happens because it often signals to the reader that the plot is going to progress with some new ideas and situations in each section. That said, in this case I am guilty of having lost the flow of the structure because I failed to see each section’s unique purpose. I’ll go into the main reason for this difficulty in the writing section, but I had a lot of trouble keeping track of the flow of the narrative and it made piecing together the reason for the structure rather difficult. 

Another major reason for this difficulty is the blend between the past and the present taken together with Harry reflecting on these events sometime in the future. The way the events are presented was easy to follow at first, but as I said I lost track of that flow as time went on. I started to confuse certain characters with others in the story as well. While I am starting to get an idea of where I lost track, in the moment while reading I was disappointed that I had lost the thread. I spent a lot of time trying to piece it back together in my mind. 

Unfortunately, I think the structure needed more indicators of when Harry was moving from his childhood to later in his life. My confusion over what was happening with the structure clouded a lot of my ability to stay on track with the story. 

Now that I’ve discussed how the narrative is built, let’s talk about the writing!

Writing

I think the writing also plays into why I lost track of the structure. I love middle-aged Harry’s reflections on his past actions and his meditations on who he was when he was younger. However, when it came to building scenes within the story, there was too much telling instead of showing. I think this is the main reason I struggled to form attachments with other characters besides Harry. 

Part of me wonders if this was intentional given Harry reflecting on his past, but I would have liked more of a blend between showing and telling even with that being the case. I know I talked about him in the character section, but Samuel’s reactions to situations are shown without delving into his direct feelings. That said, we can still see how he feels based on how he reacts. I would have liked to see more of this technique with other major characters in the story because it worked well in showing me who Samuel was, and I think it could have worked with others, too. 

All in all, I see what the story is trying to do with the writing, but I think the prose needed to show more to help set the mood and tone. 

All that said, I think I’ve covered everything. Let’s wrap this review up. 

Conclusion

I have mixed feelings, and I don’t want to feel that way. I see what the narrative is trying to do here, but it just didn’t work for me. I think the idea driving this story provides great food for thought, but the actual narrative’s structure didn’t hold up for me. I unfortunately didn’t feel as invested as I had been hoping to, which created a disconnect between the ideas I wanted to think about along with the actual story. 

As much as I hate to admit all that, I just had trouble connecting it all and this affected how I viewed the narrative. For all these reasons, I will be giving this story two stars.