The Outcasts of Time

March 12, 2018
Man’s yearning for purpose and legacy are traced through the eyes of a devout stone carver in the latest from Mortimer (The Time Traveller’s Guide to Medieval England), a compassionate and thought-provoking exploration of faith, conscience, guilt, self-worth, and redemption. In 1348 England, John of Wrayment (“Everyman”) and his older, sinful brother, William Beard, return home to Exeter, avoiding plague-ridden travelers and dead bodies along the road. After an act of kindness brings disastrous results, they become infected and fear returning to their families. Desperate, John is confronted by a mystical voice offering to let him and his brother live each one of their six remaining days 99 years after the last. Eager to make amends and earn his place in heaven, John accepts. Over 595 years, culminating with the bombings of World War II in 1942, Mortimer’s melancholy jaunt through the ages reveals the cultural and technological advancements of food, fashion, religion, government, and war. John observes the paradox that “man is a devil to man” yet has immense capacity for charity and benevolence. Through John, Mortimer tackles the philosophical quandaries of man’s brutality and hypocrisy, the nature of sin, duty to crown and country, and every man’s desire to have lived a worthy life, resulting in a ruminative and imaginative novel.

Ian Mortimer is a respected English historian, so it's no surprise that he gets the historical details right here. Narrator James Cameron Stewart has a more difficult task, conveying the outsider quality of the protagonist's speech when he travels not through space, but through time, living seven single days, each 99 years later than the last, starting in 1348 near Exeter, England. Stewart does this by giving John a strong regional accent, while most other people's speech, through time, gets closer to modern standard English. Stewart's reading is strong and passionate when needed but limited by the book's lengthy theological discussions. Those are important to the author's concept of the story, but they sometimes make the listening experience drag. D.M.H. � AudioFile 2018, Portland, Maine