Books: Chronicles of St Mary's
Oct. 7th, 2016 01:15 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ladyofastolatFor the last few weeks, I have been reading The Chronicles of St Mary’s by Jodi Taylor, which has seven novels published so far, with more to come, and around the same number of short stories.
The series is narrated in the first person by Dr Madeleine Maxwell ("Max"), a historian, who arrives for a job interview at the Institute of St Mary's. She soon learns that what looks like a chaotic research institute full of chaotic eccentrics is in fact a chaotic research institute whose chaotic eccentrics travel back in time to observe history as it happened, fuelled by endless quantities of tea. Soon she is one of them, having wacky high jinks and near disasters throughout history.
The series is mostly played for laughs. There is a lot of dry humour and sarcasm in the dialogue and narration, and incidents of almost slapstick comedy. However, it's interspersed with occasional high drama, tragedy and loss. Some of the jumps are to battlefields, massacres, executions and murders. Characters are frequently badly injured, and some are killed, the death toll being particularly high in the first book. I do at times feel that the tone lurches too fast from farce to tragedy and back again, but found this less jarring as the series goes on, either because it improved or because I got used to it.
The books are very episodic, sometimes feeling more like a collection of short stories than a novel. Each novel covers jumps to several different time periods, and a different, usually unrelated, adventure happens in each one. The later books have a little more sense of cohesion, although they remain very episodic. They would make a good TV series, I feel. We’ve got a quirky, inward-focused cast of characters, since everyone lives at St Mary’s and has no apparent life outside it. There would be a “historical period of the week,” a small amount of ongoing storyline involving character interaction, and a vague ongoing plot in the background that occasionally rears its head, but mostly stays away.
Don’t come here expecting serious science fiction. Apart from a few pieces of unfamiliar technology and occasional references to a recent period of national trauma, this future feels just like today. Apart from all their trips to the past, the characters hardly ever leave St Mary’s, so for the most part, the future world outside its walls can remain unbuilt. As for the time travel, it just happens, and there are no attempts to explain the how. Moreover, there are plenty of contradictions and inconsistencies in the way it works. It that would bother you badly, best not read this series.
I do feel that the series improves as it goes on. I liked book 1 enough to carry on, but was unhappy about certain aspects. I almost stopped reading after the second book, which I found particularly disjointed, complete with a chapter of inexplicable supernatural horror, an adventure that was so nonsensical that I kept expecting it to be revealed as a hallucination, and an episode of extreme over-reaction that made me question whether Max was someone I wanted to spend any more time with. But it was less effort to carry on than to search for a new series. Reading book 3, I again decided that this would be my last, but then came an intriguing happening and a cliffhanger ending. By book 5 or so, I realised that I had become quite fond of this series, and reluctant to finish. The short stories helped with this, since I found a couple of these quite moving.
I wouldn’t call these series a guilty pleasure, since I don’t feel any guilt. A comfort read? Perhaps – or at least until the humour is interrupted with another outbreak death and despair. Mostly, though, it’s a series I can enjoy if I don’t actually think about it too much. Yes, the tone can be rather inconsistent and the time travel is full of contradictions. Yes, the characters act like people who shouldn’t be trusted with their own front door keys, let alone the safety of the timeline. (They would be the first to admit as much.) Yes, something happens half way through the series, something that really ought to change everything utterly, yet within a book, is entirely forgotten.
But so what? I've come to enjoy this series. I've come to enjoy it quite a bit.
The series is narrated in the first person by Dr Madeleine Maxwell ("Max"), a historian, who arrives for a job interview at the Institute of St Mary's. She soon learns that what looks like a chaotic research institute full of chaotic eccentrics is in fact a chaotic research institute whose chaotic eccentrics travel back in time to observe history as it happened, fuelled by endless quantities of tea. Soon she is one of them, having wacky high jinks and near disasters throughout history.
The series is mostly played for laughs. There is a lot of dry humour and sarcasm in the dialogue and narration, and incidents of almost slapstick comedy. However, it's interspersed with occasional high drama, tragedy and loss. Some of the jumps are to battlefields, massacres, executions and murders. Characters are frequently badly injured, and some are killed, the death toll being particularly high in the first book. I do at times feel that the tone lurches too fast from farce to tragedy and back again, but found this less jarring as the series goes on, either because it improved or because I got used to it.
The books are very episodic, sometimes feeling more like a collection of short stories than a novel. Each novel covers jumps to several different time periods, and a different, usually unrelated, adventure happens in each one. The later books have a little more sense of cohesion, although they remain very episodic. They would make a good TV series, I feel. We’ve got a quirky, inward-focused cast of characters, since everyone lives at St Mary’s and has no apparent life outside it. There would be a “historical period of the week,” a small amount of ongoing storyline involving character interaction, and a vague ongoing plot in the background that occasionally rears its head, but mostly stays away.
Don’t come here expecting serious science fiction. Apart from a few pieces of unfamiliar technology and occasional references to a recent period of national trauma, this future feels just like today. Apart from all their trips to the past, the characters hardly ever leave St Mary’s, so for the most part, the future world outside its walls can remain unbuilt. As for the time travel, it just happens, and there are no attempts to explain the how. Moreover, there are plenty of contradictions and inconsistencies in the way it works. It that would bother you badly, best not read this series.
I do feel that the series improves as it goes on. I liked book 1 enough to carry on, but was unhappy about certain aspects. I almost stopped reading after the second book, which I found particularly disjointed, complete with a chapter of inexplicable supernatural horror, an adventure that was so nonsensical that I kept expecting it to be revealed as a hallucination, and an episode of extreme over-reaction that made me question whether Max was someone I wanted to spend any more time with. But it was less effort to carry on than to search for a new series. Reading book 3, I again decided that this would be my last, but then came an intriguing happening and a cliffhanger ending. By book 5 or so, I realised that I had become quite fond of this series, and reluctant to finish. The short stories helped with this, since I found a couple of these quite moving.
I wouldn’t call these series a guilty pleasure, since I don’t feel any guilt. A comfort read? Perhaps – or at least until the humour is interrupted with another outbreak death and despair. Mostly, though, it’s a series I can enjoy if I don’t actually think about it too much. Yes, the tone can be rather inconsistent and the time travel is full of contradictions. Yes, the characters act like people who shouldn’t be trusted with their own front door keys, let alone the safety of the timeline. (They would be the first to admit as much.) Yes, something happens half way through the series, something that really ought to change everything utterly, yet within a book, is entirely forgotten.
But so what? I've come to enjoy this series. I've come to enjoy it quite a bit.
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Date: 2016-10-07 03:19 pm (UTC)I don't think I'll be giving the series another go. I'll soldier on with a series that starts well and gets progressively worse for some time before calling it a day, but I generally haven't the patience to struggle on with a series that starts badly but gets better.
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