Listened to the audiobook with Maarten Westra Hoekzema – honestly a terrible reading, constantly missing emphasis and sentence structure. Felt like a poorly conditioned AI – I recommend reading on paper instead.

We’ve discussed before that the speculative genre is not particularly well developed in Dutch language literature, so when a Dutch sci-fi book hits the mainstream, I jump.

Ik kom hier nog op terug (’I’ll get back to this’) is typical of Dutch ‘genre’ literature in that it rubs up against ‘regular’ big-L Literature in many ways, including themes and conventions of style. It feels a lot more like magical realism than it does sci-fi. What distinguishes it from proper Dutch Literature is that it is neither about (i) the Second World War; (ii) how colonising Indonesia made Dutch people Sad™ nor (iii) sex, which is a welcome relief.

Still, it takes half the book for the first elements of sci-fi to appear. The start of the novel is frankly indistinguishable from traditional Dutch high brow Literature, with the exception that at some point Van Essen gives us a throwaway line that ‘he’ll get to the stuff about the time machine’. I’d argue that that seems like a pretty cheap way to keep your reader engaged, but it worked on me, so I’ll keep my mouth shut.

While the initial section of the novel is important for the plot going forward, it is slow and I really had to struggle through. The pace picks up a bit at about the 1/3rd mark of the book when we get to the protagonist’s adult life, but the novel is always going to remain a slow burn.

It is difficult to say much more about the story without giving away the mysteries that form the core of the novel, but once the ball got rolling on the main narrative, I happily returned to see it through and get some answers.

I felt the book ultimately fizzled a bit when the answers turned out to be few and far between (though I understand that that is, to some extent, the point). On the other hand, I think it is typical of the kind of book that Van Essen is writing that we’re focusing on the characters as opposed to the plot. The mystery is just a device to get us to think about certain questions, and we have to give it to Van Essen that the questions he poses are more than adequate to keep the reader involved.

The result of the mysteries sort of ‘hanging around’ for most of the book and the protagonists at some point mostly disengaging with them is that Ik kom hier nog op terug has a surreal vibe. The novel is also very clearly nostalgic for having studied in the 80s in Amsterdam, which I didn’t (big surprise: I wasn’t born yet), which might have added to that surreal feeling for me.

I think Ik kom hier nog op terug sits at an interesting, but difficult intersection: perhaps a bit too speculative for the reader of Literature, perhaps too literate for the fan of the genre.

Personally, I liked Ik kom hier nog op terug well enough as a sci-fi fan, though ultimately I probably wouldn’t call it a sci-fi novel. Ik kom hier nog op terug is not about the effect of possible future events or inventions on human society, but about the long term effects of seemingly innocuous choices on individuals, and whether these are things we (should) regret. The time machine in the novel only exists to make that question more tangible. As a result, I felt Van Essen didn’t really attempt to engage with the broader sci-fi genre, other than referencing H.G. Wells’ The Time Machine and its 1960 movie adaptation. This feeling was rather reinforced when he mixed up steampunk and cyberpunk in a throwaway line of dialogue.

In conclusion then, Ik kom hier nog op terug is well worth the read, but don’t trust the librarians and booksellers that file it under the science-fiction section!