The Chronicles Of St Mary’s by Jodie Taylor
I have mentioned this
series before but I thought I would add some further comments as I have been
re-reading them over the past month.
I
first read them more than a decade ago, but abandoned them around Book Five due
to getting confused by all the characters and bored by what felt like the
increasingly contrived plot twists.
This
time round, I found that I was easily able to differentiate between characters
and keep them all in my head. Either I have become more skilled at doing this
(unlikely!), or I just wasn’t concentrating when I first read them. I am also
continuing to enjoy the episodes when the historians of St Mary’s go back in
time to revisit key events. Last time, I was beginning to grow a little bored with
these adventures, mainly because of the stress of knowing they always seem to go
wrong. Though Jodi Taylor takes some liberties with the known facts now and
then, in general I have actually learned a lot about many historical events about which I only had a sketchy
knowledge previously.
The plot twists are
still mildly irritating, but this is a problem for all writers of novel series.
You get new ideas which have to be woven into the existing books, and sometimes
that requires some major rejigging of the narrative. This can lead to
stretching the reader’s suspension of disbelief a little in places.
Time travel stories
are always tricksy, and writers often have to disguise bloop-holes with a lot
of camouflage. In Taylor’s universe, historians can only visit a specific place
in time once – multiple versions of one individual cannot exist simultaneously,
though it is unclear what would actually happen if they did. This doesn’t
explain however why they can’t travel back to a slightly earlier point in time
in order to put right the various catastrophes that happen to St Mary’s staff
when they go back in time. Surely, their ongoing search for Clive Ronan could
be resolved rapidly if they just went back to an hour before he committed his
first crime and shot him dead then? Yes,
yes, I know. Time paradoxes. The moral conundrum of whether it is right to kill
someone who hasn’t committed a crime as yet. Blah di blah. Writers have to come
up with increasingly arcane and convoluted reasons for why time travellers like
Dr Who or Michael Burnham can’t just go
back in time and put right their own mistakes. I tend to take the line taken by
Terry Pratchett’s fabulously arrogant wizards – if they are here in the past
and stand on a butterfly, then they had always been here in the past in order
to stand on the butterfly, even when they were in the present. They changed
nothing, because it had already been changed by them. Yeah, thinking about
time-travel does give you a headache.
And anyway, in Taylor’s
stories, Leon Farrell and Dr Bairstow are from the future anyway but have settled
in the past, and Max visits a future St Mary’s several times (and some of them
visit the older St Mary’s), and the Time Police are based in the future…
My only other niggle
is the character of the central protagonist and narrator, Dr Madeleine ‘Max’ Maxwell.
Someone said to me a while back that she found Max irritating, and that made me
realise that so did I. Max is
undoubtedly a lively, witty, cynical, brave, self-deprecating, good-natured
woman, so why would I find her irritating? Taylor does an excellent job of
conveying her personality, which is consistent throughout. She makes her
vulnerable, a survivor of child abuse, a damaged woman with supposedly low
self-esteem, who is something of a disaster-magnet, but who survives due to her
strength of character and intelligence. I ought to love her! But in fact, she often annoys me to hell. Her
constant misunderstanding of what other characters mean or say, particularly
her significant other, Leon, often feels like a plot contrivance. I find myself
thinking ‘Oh, for god’s sake, Maxwell, just have a proper conversation, then
you would avoid a lot of heart-ache and I wouldn’t have to read about it for
the next ten pages’. I’m also uncomfortable with her apparent ability to let
her son Matthew be more or less brought up by the Time Police, after he has
been lost to her for seven years in horrendous circumstances. I find it
slightly irritating that her best friends are all men – Leon, Peterson, Markham
(she is close friends with Kal for two books but then she goes off to join
Thirsk University) – though I’m not sure exactly why this annoys me. And I am
deeply irritated by the fact that she always surprised when men find her
attractive, when clearly she is a woman men fancy – she is short, but curvy,
with masses of gorgeous red hair. But these are silly niggles as Taylor has
written Max accurately and plausibly, and also readers don’t have to adore a
character to enjoy a story.
So, overall, if I
ignore the wish-fulfilment sex scenes between Max and Leon (which are certainly
not the worst sex scenes I’ve ever read by a long way, but they are slightly
excruciating to me nevertheless), the slightly irritating aspects of the
protagonist’s personality, and the sometimes implausible plot shenanigans, I am
enjoying the books this time round. Oh, and some of the set-piece ‘comic’
scenes are becoming wearisome as the novels progress, but that’s in the nature
of such things and Taylor does a good job of them on the whole. I can see why
this series has been so successful and I think they deserve their success.
Updated rating: **** [well worth a read if you like
entertaining comic-fantasy and disreputable heroines]
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