In the 400 years since Rose’s death he has roamed the world, unwilling to settle, unable to find happiness. Similar accusations dog his beloved wife, Rose, and daughter, Marion, until he must leave them for their own safety. Superstitious neighbors condemn his mother as a witch. His unchanging appearance arouses hostility and suspicion. To him his longevity is a curse, forcing him from an early age to live alone. Others of Tom’s kind - known as albatrosses (or “albas”), after the bird thought in Victorian times to be exceptionally long-lived - consider their lives infinitely superior to ordinary humans (or “mayflies”) who live so briefly. In “How to Stop Time,” Haig has ditched the comedy for something more melancholic. “The Humans” was warmhearted, sharply observed and often laugh-out-loud funny, funny enough to forgive Haig’s alien his regrettable fondness for fortune-cookie philosophy. Fearful of the power this would give violent and primitive humans, an advanced alien super-race from the planet Vonnadoria hurriedly dispatched one of their kind to extinguish all traces of his theory. Haig himself touched on the idea in his previous novel, “The Humans,” which saw an eccentric English mathematician unlocking the secret of prime numbers and thereby the means to rid the world of illness and death. In recent years Audrey Niffenegger’s “The Time Traveler’s Wife” and Kate Atkinson’s “Life After Life” have both played inventively with the idea of lives lived outside of ordinary time. Ever since Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver traveled to the nation of Luggnagg, where the “struldbrugs” age but never die, writers have used the notion of immortality to examine the possibilities and limits of a human life. And like many middle-aged men, he appears to be suffering something of a midlife crisis. With four centuries of life under his belt, he is only just approaching middle age. Although Tom lives life at the same pace as everyone else, judging by his appearance, it would seem that “only a decade passes between the death of Napoleon and the first man on the moon.” Immune to almost all human diseases, and assuming he avoids a violent death, Tom can expect to live until he is around 950. People with anageria age much more slowly than ordinary people, at a rate of roughly one year for every 15 ordinary human years. This is because Tom has a condition, rare but not unique, known as anageria. Not that anyone would know it to look at him, since outwardly he appears to be an ordinary man in his 40s.

He is old, he tells us, “in the way that a tree, or a quahog clam, or a Renaissance painting is old.” Born in France in 1581, he is fast approaching his 440th birthday. The first thing we discover about Tom Hazard, the protagonist of Matt Haig’s new novel, “How to Stop Time,” is that he is very, very old.

Matt haig how to stop time