In a Time of War #MarchMagics2025

This month, looking for something to keep my mind off current events, I came across author Lissa Evans in my TBR. Some time ago I had enjoyed a movie based on one of her novels, Their Finest, and wanted to look into her writing.

I did get around to that book eventually (originally titled Their Finest Hour and a Half, it concerns the making of a wartime “true story” film that isn’t exactly true), but I started out with Evans’s trilogy centered around Noel, a parentless boy who finds unlikely companionship with a couple of older women. During World War II, when he’s evacuated from London, he forms an unlikely but successful alliance with Vee, a woman whom life has not treated kindly – this story is told in Crooked Heart and V for Victory. In a prequel, Old Baggage, we meet Noel’s former guardian Mattie, who earlier fought for the suffragette cause and is still determined to play a role in changing the world, if only by influencing the next generation.

In the midst of all this realistic historical fiction, I wanted to read something for March Magics, hosted by Calmgrove Books – a celebration of fantasy authors Diana Wynne Jones and Terry Pratchett. And what better choice than A Tale of Time City, the book by Jones which starts out with a girl getting snatched off a train platform as she’s being evacuated from London to the country during World War II? What might all these wartime stories have to say to one another, and to us today, I wondered?

With Evans’s work, I was impressed by how absolutely real and alive the characters became for me. I would not be surprised to open a history book and find a report on Mattie’s suffragette activities, or an encyclopedia and discover that Noel had grown up to become a famous scientist or scholar. But though they were in many ways extraordinary people, Evans made them real through their ordinariness, their humanness, the way they had to scrape through difficult times and face their mistakes and shortcomings with humility. These stories made me laugh at their foibles and gasp at their shocks, feeling with and for them. And amid the rubble and the deprivation of war, there was magic in how people found each other, forming new relationships, creating something as much was being destroyed…a brave venture, when those fragile bonds could be suddenly, shockingly cut short by death.

With Time City, we’re plunged into a similar situation of displacement and danger that also becomes a source of magic and wonder – more literally, in this case. Vivian, the girl from our world, is kidnapped by a boy named Jonathan, in league with a younger boy, Sam, both citizens of Time City – a futuristic place floating outside of ordinary time, where people study, profit from, and sometimes manipulate the progress of history.

A crisis is looming, though; it seems that Time City is on the verge of breaking up, and nobody knows quite how to deal with it. Jonathan and Sam’s kidnapping Vivian is part of a plan to save their world, but as the three children journey through time and space on a quest for stability, they invariably make things worse. When a proud, immature person wants to save his world, and instead of looking towards more mature guidance, takes impulsive actions based on partial or misunderstood information, it can’t end well … something that happens all too often in our own everyday world.

Here, though, that dilemma is given a fictional setting that allows for Jones’s imagination to really fly. Since Time City is outside of time, she gets to create a future history for our earth and all kinds of inventions. Some of the inventions are fun and wish-fulfilling, exemplified by the infamous Butter-Pie, but also including a belt with buttons to press for multiple functions (light, low-gravity, turning your finger into a pen), the ability to watch all the movies ever made through the centuries, and portals that make time travel as easy as taking the subway. Others are darker and more disturbing — such as when the children visit an era in history known as the “Mind Wars”. In fact, there are quite a number of scenes that would have given me nightmares as a child if I’d really given myself a chance to think about them.

But these dangers are not dwelt on, as the pace of the story hurtles quite rapidly and there are lots of distractions, from bickering between the children to a classically frightening tutor who assigns a translation exercise to Vivian that makes for some of the book’s most comic scenes (and there are many). Along with humor and drama, Jones mixes science fiction and fantasy tropes with abandon; though the city is supposedly powered by science rather than magic, it’s also a place of legend and ceremony, with myths about its founders Faber John and the Time Lady woven throughout.

Unlike their elders, Jonathan and Sam take the ancient stories seriously, and it turns out they’re correct to do so. However, they are not correct about a lot of other things; one of the points the story makes is that even when we believe or know that something is going to happen — in Time City, ghost-like visions stamped onto the fabric of time give such glimpses of future events — our interpretation of those events might not be the right one, causing trouble.

The lively mix of wild, exciting, mysterious, and paradoxical experiences seems to be what keeps the girl, Vivian, from being overly despondent at her situation. She gets caught up herself in the quest to save Time City, which increasingly becomes incompatible with her original longing to simply return home, and the mistakes pile up into a royal tangle. Many elements come together in a great crisis, to be rearranged or re-sorted and settle into a new reality. That’s a common pattern in DWJ’s books, and yet it seldom seems repetitive or tiresome. It’s always a fresh instance of the true potential of “comedy” – a story that brings us through chaos and back into wholeness.

Though fun to read, I do find A Tale of Time City to be something of a weak link in the chain of truly extraordinary and original books that Diana Wynne Jones produced during the 1980s, from The Homeward Bounders to The Lives of Christopher Chant. It does bring up an important question — What is the moral obligation of living outside history, with a greater awareness than its inhabitants possess? Is it possible to help and not merely to meddle or exploit? — that isn’t given time or space to be worked in a really satisfying way. There is much more external than internal action, with lots of racing around through history and touring Time City, and the characters end up being somewhat sketchy and one-sided. Sam’s passion for butter-pies starts to grow tedious, and though there’s a hint of trouble in Jonathan’s relationship with his father (a high Time City official), it’s just an indication of something beyond the story surface. Even Vivian, the point-of-view character, remained vague and generic to me, compared to unforgettable Jones creations like Nan in Witch Week or Polly in Fire and Hemlock.

Nevertheless, I agree with what Ursula Le Guin points out in her introduction to the edition I read: that like all DWJ’s books, this one is characterized by “intelligent truthfulness“ and “moral honesty”. That may not sound glamorous, but for a fantasy writer, these are very important qualities to have. They mean that when a writer starts putting inner realities into images, showing us the endless realm of possibilities at work in our creative spirit, we are in safe hands. We won’t be deceived or misled, but shown truth in the way humans absorb it best: through living pictures that move our souls and have the potential to transform us, toward better, kinder, more aware versions of ourselves. In book after book, this moral core shines through, anchoring us amid all the wild inventiveness and humor.

That brings me back to Lissa Evans’s talent for combining drama and comedy as well, with an honest moral core. I also felt I was in good hands with her, brought to look at some tricky moral situations with compassion rather than rigid notions about right and wrong. In a time of warfare, when people are acting and reacting in angry, fearful, impulsive ways, it’s good to be reminded of that human potential.

The best stories educate us as well as providing needed distraction, a helpful distance from which — like citizens of Time City — we can look at things from a wider perspective. Destruction is part of the cycle of history, but what will we build out of the ruins? All of these books encouraged me to keep looking for that potential, and I hope you’ll look for it too.