The heart of the story: At its simplest,
If Only Suomi is a
love story built around time travel. The premise is that
Al, coming from 2028, travels back to 1972 for just three days. While there, he falls in love with Suomi. He then has to return to his own time, leaving the woman he loves in the past. The central emotional question is therefore not just
"Can you travel through time?" but
"What would you do if you found the love of your life in the wrong time?"That gives the novel a strong feeling of longing and regret. The phrase If Only becomes almost a philosophy: If only I could go back. If only I had made a different choice. If only I could see that person again.
The really unusual part: is it fiction? This is where the book gets much more intriguing.
Buffry's own introduction says that he doesn't see the book as fitting neatly into fiction or non-fiction. He describes it as containing elements of memories, dreams, prophecy and wishful thinking, and suggests that it is "some sort of time travel"—even if that travel takes place only in the mind.
So you can read it on at least two levels:
1. As science fiction:
Al literally travels from 2028 to 1972, creating the classic problems of time travel—paradoxes, changing the past, and potentially altering or erasing one's own future.
2. As a psychological story:
The time travel can be understood metaphorically. Human beings constantly travel through time in their minds. We remember the past, dream about it, imagine alternative versions of our lives, and wonder what might have happened if we had made different decisions.
Buffry explicitly plays with this idea of "dreams within dreams" and asks where the boundary lies between dreams, memories, imagination and reality.
The time-travel paradoxes
The book also seems to be interested in the classic philosophical problems of time travel.
Buffry's description specifically raises the possibility of someone travelling back and changing their own past—and even the possibility of "wiping oneself out of time altogether."
That makes the book less about scientific explanations of time travel and more about the philosophical consequences of it.
Why 1972 matters
The choice of 1972 is particularly interesting because it connects the fictional premise with Buffry's own life and interests. Buffry was born in 1950, and his bibliography includes autobiographical and travel works connected with the 1970s, including All About My Hat: The Hippy Trail 1972.
The book's combination of romance + time travel + dreams + autobiography is more significant than the straightforward plot summary suggests. Buffry describes the book as involving memories, dreams, prophecies and wishful thinking, and says it contains a kind of time travel "if only in the mind." He asks whether there is a meaningful difference between dreams and memories and talks about "dreams within dreams."
This means that the book may be deliberately making us question whether literal time travel is even the most important kind of time travel.
Based on the author's own framing, I would interpret the ending less as a conventional "the time machine worked and here's exactly what happened" resolution and more as a deliberately blurred boundary between reality, memory, dreams and alternate possibilities.
The book's premise of Al returning to 1972 and falling in love with Suomi is so powerful.
Buffry's own description strongly suggests that the book intentionally refuses to draw a firm line between what happened, what was remembered, what was dreamed and what was wished for.
