Summary: Only Time Will Tell

The GIST

Only Time Will Tell by Jeffrey Archer is the opening volume of The Clifton Chronicles, a seven-book family saga, and it does exactly what a first volume should: it makes you care about a boy, plants a secret under his feet, and then walks him slowly toward it. Published in 2011, it follows Harry Clifton from a poor childhood beside the docks of Bristol, England, in the years just after the First World War, to the edge of adulthood as the Second World War breaks out. Harry has been raised to believe his father died a soldier. The truth about how the man died, and the larger question of whether he was Harry's father at all, drives everything that happens.

Archer is one of the best-selling storytellers alive, with more than 300 million books sold, and this novel shows why. It went to number one the day after its release, and the copies at its launch in India sold out the same day. Reviewers called it absurdly enjoyable and compared its cast to The Forsyte Saga. What looks at first like a simple story of a clever boy making good turns, by its last pages, into a tale of power, betrayal and bitter hatred between two families who should never have met.

The Story

The world Harry is born into is small and hard. His family lives in poverty near the Bristol docks, and the future laid out for him is the one every man around him has had: leave school early and go to work on the waterfront. That was the life of Arthur Clifton, the stevedore Harry knows as his father, and it is still the life of his uncle, Stan Tancock, his mother's brother and Arthur's best friend and workmate, a heavy drinker who somehow keeps functioning. Stan teaches the boy about life on the docks and fully expects him to sign on at the shipyard the moment he is old enough. The yard belongs to the Barrington family, owners of the Barrington Shipping Line and pillars of West Country society.

Harry has been told that his father was killed in the war. The adults around him stick to that line. But his mother knows more than she says, a handful of other people know what really happened to Arthur Clifton, and nobody tells the boy a thing. As Harry gets older he starts to do the arithmetic himself, and the dates do not fit. If Arthur died in the war, he cannot have been Harry's father.

Three people change the direction of his life. The first is Miss Monday, the choir mistress, who discovers that the scruffy boy from the docks has a remarkable singing voice. The second is Mr. Holcombe, his teacher at Merrywood Elementary, who sees a mind worth saving. The third, and the one readers remember, is Old Jack Tar. His real name is Captain Jack Tarrant, and he holds the Victoria Cross, won for saving the lives of his fellow officers and men. He also killed eleven enemy soldiers to earn it, and that left a mark on him that never healed. He withdrew from the world entirely, until his former lieutenant, Sir Walter Barrington, whose life he had saved, talked him into taking a job as night watchman at the Barrington shipyard. He lives there alone, in an old railway carriage. To the dockers he is an oddity. To Harry he becomes a teacher, a conscience and the nearest thing to a father the boy has.

Together these three work to get Harry something no docker's son expects: a choral scholarship to St Bede's, an exclusive boys' school. The gift of song opens the door, and Harry walks into a world where he does not know the rules. His house master is Mr Frobisher. Among the boys he meets a snob named Fisher, who treats him as a street urchin, the child of a docker and a waitress with no business among his betters. At one low moment Harry tells Old Jack he means to give up and run away to sea on any boat that will have him. Old Jack turns the idea over and hands it back to him: leaving would be giving Fisher exactly the story he wants to tell. Harry's fear is that he is not in Fisher's class. Old Jack's answer is that Fisher already knows the reverse is true, and always will be.

School also gives Harry the two friendships that anchor the book. One is with Algernon Deakins, a companion throughout his school years. The other is with Giles Barrington, who becomes his best friend. Giles is the son of Hugo Barrington, heir to the shipping line, and the grandson of Sir Walter. The friendship is easy and real between the boys. It is anything but easy for Hugo.

Hugo Barrington is the villain of the piece. Old Jack's verdict on him is that he is not cut from the same cloth as his father, the upright and god-fearing Sir Walter. Hugo despises his son's new friend from the first, for reasons nobody around him can see, and he sets about putting obstacles in the boy's way. The reader is given more to go on than the characters are. Hugo is one of the few who knows what truly happened to Arthur Clifton. And the question the novel dangles from its very first page is whether Harry is the son of a Bristol stevedore or the firstborn son of a man whose family owns the shipping line. Around Hugo stand his wife, Elizabeth, her father Lord Harvey, who keeps an estate in Scotland, and his daughter Emma, Giles's sister.

While Harry is away learning Latin and finding his feet, the book's quiet heroine is fighting her own war at home. Maisie Clifton, left to fend for the family after her husband's sudden death, works as a waitress in a tea shop and counts every penny to keep her son at school. Things ease a little once she has that job, but the respite does not last. She is hit by one personal disaster after another, and each time she has to decide how far she will go so that Harry's education can continue. Some of what she does she knows to be wrong. She does it anyway, because the alternative is her son back on the docks.

Harry grows up. He and Emma Barrington, who have always got along, fall in love. A place at Oxford is within reach. And then history arrives. It looks more and more as though England will go to war with Germany, and Harry has to choose between taking up his place at university and joining the navy to fight Hitler. At the same moment, some twenty years after the story began, the truth about Arthur Clifton's death finally reaches him, and with it the far more dangerous question of whose son he is. The story travels from working-class Bristol to the busy streets of New York in 1940, and it stops on a deliberately dark cliffhanger, a dilemma that neither Harry nor the reader could have seen coming. What that dilemma is belongs to the book.

What It's Really About

At its heart this is a novel about class and how much of a life is decided before it starts. Harry's talent is real, but talent alone would have left him on the waterfront. It takes a choir mistress who listens, a teacher who pushes, a recluse who believes in him and a mother who will give up almost anything to turn a gift into a future. Archer is clear-eyed about how thin that ladder is and how many people at the top of it would be happy to kick it away.

It is also a book about secrets, and about what silence costs. Nearly every adult in Harry's life is keeping something from him, some out of love and some out of fear for themselves. The boy grows up inside a story that is not true, and the novel's tension comes from watching him get closer and closer to the edge of it. Because of the way Archer tells it, the reader often knows what a character does not, and part of the pleasure is waiting to see how each of them takes the blow.

That telling is the book's most distinctive feature. Archer hands the story in turn to six narrators: Harry, Maisie, Giles, Emma, Hugo and Old Jack. He will cover several years through one pair of eyes and then go back and cover the same years through another. In lesser hands that would mean going over old ground. Here each voice fills in what the last one could not see, so that a scene which seemed innocent in Harry's account turns out to have had a great deal going on behind it. Readers say it lets them understand every character's motives, and hate the villain all the more.

And then there is Maisie. Many readers finish the book thinking of it as hers as much as Harry's. Her sacrifices, the secret she carries about her son's birth and the compromises she makes with her own conscience give the saga its emotional weight.

Why do people love it? Because it moves. Reviewers admit it can be a little predictable in places and say they stayed up far too late regardless. The chapters end on hooks, the revelations are fed out at just the right rate, and the twists pile up as the end approaches. The one warning nearly everyone gives is the ending: very little is tied up. This is the first act of a much longer story, one planned to run across a hundred years of history, and it is built to send you straight to the next volume.

Who Should Read It

Anyone who loves a big, old-fashioned family saga with a boy to root for, a mother to admire and a villain to boo will be at home here, as will readers drawn to stories set between the two world wars. It suits people who want to be carried along by plot and are glad to commit to a long series. If you need a novel to close its own loops, know before you start that this one ends on a cliffhanger, and have the second book within reach.