This is one of those novels that improves on a second reading. Probably I tried to race through it too fast first time I read it. And with a many stranded novel such as this, that will not work.
Although it’s a story of time travelling, and does the nitty gritty of the character in the 1300s very well, it’s also an extremely detailed story of the latter half of the twentieth century masquerading as the 2050s.
While I never confused the two eras, the detail of life in the so-called 2050s and the number of interesting lives that were being described, made it hard to sustain interest in the historian stuck in the 1320s. Especially since it became clear early in the piece that her rescue would have to originate in the future where she came from.
I found it increasingly difficult to have patience enough to go back into the 1320s and I suspect that the story set in the 1320s was always smaller. The mystery of Kithrin’s illness too had to be solved in the future.
The set-up took a long time, many pages of often not-understandable detail before we meet Kithrin in 1320. Which is normal in SF, of course. There is always a lot of material needed to be held ‘in abeyance’, as it used to be called, where a reader needs to remember a bunch of new facts before they are explained.
In this story, there were frequent reminders rather than an explanation as early as possible.
There was so much of such detail that it gave the impression of foam on the real beer underneath, or seafoam on a beach where you have to wade through to find the strand’s features.
Kithrin’s problems with the language in the medieval time where she was transposed went on for longer than I had patience for, yet this is not a novel where you can skip bits. The old words begged to be translated but the effort took me out of the story too often.
I began to look forward to Colin’s story for its comic relief, with hardly with any relevance to the main two stories.
The style tells me the time the events are taking place are maybe the 1950s to 1980s. It was published in 1992. And so the story’s present day reads like history in this present day, not the 2050s not too far into our future.
This novel will reward a patient reader prepared to chew through it steadily. Almost every actor in it, even walk on parts, get characterisation, their fifteen minutes on the stage. There were parts I enjoyed and parts that irritated me.
Rita de Heer 