I just finished Chris Meade’s experimental fiction (what he calls ‘magical musical graphical digital fiction’), and I wanted to share. In Search of Lost Tim (the title is a pun on the original translated title for Proust’s A La Recherche du Temps Perdu) combines drawings, videos, songs, puppets, slideshows, photos and prose to deliver an appealing tale of time travelling, love and loss. Tim of the title is actually Tim Times Two: one going through boyhood in the sixties, and one in the future, where everything has gone a bit Austin Powers (proving that everything comes around again eventually) and he’s a big noise in the the government. Future Tim communicates with Young Tim by means of the Futurizer, giving him missions to prevent the course of history being corrupted – the sort of thing every boy should have!

We see young Tim as a puppet, voiced by Meade, and read his accounts of his dull home life and crappy school life. The video segments, delivered as YouTube clips, are surprisingly touching given the simplicity of the puppet being used, while the diary passages are well written. Future Tim, along with his sidekick, known only as… Sidekick, is drawn in an engaging cartoon style. There’s also a genuinely bloggy-looking blog for a girl called Jenny, who seems to have stumbled across Tim’s time-spanning communications by accident, but turns out to be very central to saving the universe!

Meades is adept at giving his different characters distinctive voices, both on the page and via video and song, and the drawings add a psychedelic edge to proceedings. The use of the Internet for delivery is not ideal, as I think the creator knows – because asking users to work through 30 web pages, albeit some of which are relatively brief, is a challenge when all the other paraphernalia of our digital lives can intrude. Having said that, if you can clear an hour of your life, and avoid tabbing off to check your e-mails or see whether the world economy has exploded yet, I think you will find In Search of Lost Tim to be a charming and enjoyable tale, and proof that there can be more to short stories than just words and pictures on a printed page.

Read In Search of Lost Tim now

Bookmark to