In the beginning, in the future, the discovery of time travel became known to all. As a result, chaos reigned, history was written and re-written and the world nearly ended in the Time Wars.
In order to stop this, the Time Police were created. An international organisation with near-unlimited powers to perform their duty, to keep the timelines straight. Time travel is now punishable by death, the sentencing of which by the Time Police is now accepted without question.
The work’s not easy and many Police have died in the process, which means that the need for new employees is always there. The ‘new blood’ doesn’t even have to be good, as they are seen as expendable.
Enter Jane, Luke, and Matthew – three of the most useless recruits ever, who have ended up as newbies, not always of their own choosing. Jane is “the wet one”, scared of her own shadow as a consequence of an overbearing upbringing from a dictatorial granny. Matthew is the enthusiastic geek – too young and inexperienced in life to be an obvious talent, and Luke is the indolent playboy put in the Time Police by his father ‘for his own good’.
Just in case you haven’t realised, this is the first in a ‘spin-off’ series from Jodi’s very very successful The Chronicles of St. Mary’s series. Set in the same world, Doing Time has that same tone, a combination of wry humour and action that the original series (ten novels, nine novellas and counting) had.
Whereas the early books of St. Mary’s are written around the focus of Professor ‘Max’ Maxwell, Doing Time is mainly written in the third person, but with individual chapters as from Jane, Luke, and Matthew. The recruits are not nasty or cruel. Matthew is enthusiastic yet very young and naïve, Jane is a self-conscious dreamer searching for a meaning to her own life whilst Luke is determined to get through training with as little effort as possible – to start with. This broader scope has clearly given the author a bit more room to flex her writing skills and broaden this book out a little, which is refreshing.
Of course, St. Mary’s makes an appearance too. There are references to things that have happened at St. Mary’s before and characters who readers may know from St Mary’s, but on the whole it is not essential to know details. Perhaps the most overt link is that Matthew is the son of two very famous St. Mary’s historians that many readers will recognise and love their reappearance. Fans of the St. Mary’s books will gladly welcome a brief return to that world as well time spent at the headquarters of the Time Police (which looks remarkably like Battersea Power Station).
It’s probably never a good thing to give an organisation unlimited power, for whatever reason, and so it proves here. Reading this from a different perspective, it would be easy to see the Time Police as temporal fascists, maintaining world order through manipulating events in time. It is true that those given the power are often doomed to use it in unusual and unwarranted ways, something not unnoticed here with typical humour. Matthew’s parents are horrified by his decision to join up and do good, for example:
“… if you want to join a bunch of mindless thugs who can’t get anything right and ruin people’s lives, why don’t you become a politician?”
I imagine that it is rather like happily admitting you’ve agreed to enrol as one of Darth Vader’s henchmen. And yet the skill of the writer is such that the reader gains a degree of sympathy for those doing a tough job, like our hapless heroes. Things are changing for the Time Police, and our characters are at the front of such change.
The general plot is nothing particularly new to regular genre readers, but it is great fun. With such broad and varied backgrounds, and relative inexperience, our group of trainees are regarded as a joke by the older veterans – freshmen who will either crash and burn or who will scrape through their induction and then be shifted off to something innocuous and mundane. Their first mission involves tracking down and arresting someone who has managed the heinous crime of building their own time machine. The novice’s methods of doing so are unorthodox but are successful, and from this it seems that this will be another story of outsiders making good against all challenges.
For much of the time it is. The murder of a Time Police officer, however, makes things go rather Agatha Christie and become more serious, especially when one of the group appears to be the culprit and another seems to be covering up for them. Rather expectedly, there’s consequently a chase through time with our runaways hiding in Ancient Rome before things are resolved at the end with a marvelous flourish and the return of some well-known characters.
Summing up, then, Doing Time is another wonderfully imaginative story, filled with warmth, humour and bureaucratic ineptitude. Think Police Academy with a sci-fi slant (although with a good deal more wit), reading Jodi’s books is like the feeling you get snuggling down in a duvet with a lovely hot cup of tea on hand. Whilst there are some worrying aspects of the practicalities of such a role – time travel usually manages a default reset option, for example – these can be safely ignored in return for some good-humoured entertainment (and some really bad puns.)
For those looking for a comparison, it should be seen as a compliment if I say that Doing Time reminds me of Jasper Fforde at his finest. It is fast, funny and literate, another thoroughly entertaining read from this talented author that I found difficult to put down. Fans of Jodi’s other books will not be disappointed. Bloody marvellous – please give me more.
Doing Time by Jodi Taylor
Published by Headline, October 2019
480 pages
ISBN: 978-1472267474
Review by Mark Yon
