THE WARRIOR'S PRINCESS
By Barbara Erskine
HarperCollins 695 pages $39.95
In contemporary writing, fiction and film, the term time-slip refers to a subgenre of fantasy writing that blends the paranormal with contemporary realism and historical fiction. Generally speaking, time-slip fiction can be recognized by the movement of its characters through time, via supernatural or metaphysical means, rather than through the use of technology. The characters typically maintain their modern sensibility throughout, lending a certain self-aware quality to much writing of this type. Time-slip elements are becoming increasingly mainstream. In fact, it's such a common and accessible form of fantasy that many people will be reading it without being aware that they are doing so, even those adamantly opposed to fantasy in general. Noted authors of variations of the time-slip theme include Diana Gabaldon with her best selling Outlander series and Kurt Vonnegut's classic Slaughterhouse-Five.
Bestselling author Barbara Erskine has been carving out a unique niche for herself within the time-slip subgenre, beginning with her classic first novel Lady of Hay, which was recently reprinted more than 20 years after the original edition was published. Rich with detailed historical research, touched with romance, and filled with Erskine's trademark supernatural elements, her newest novel, The Warrior's Princess is set to take its rightful position alongside her other time-slip novels.
The Warrior's Princess begins in contemporary London. The morning after the end of term party, Jess, an English literature teacher, awakens in her home to discover she has been assaulted. When signs indicate that her attacker is not only someone she knows, but is continuing to stalk her, Jess packs up and flees to her sister's remote cottage on the Welsh border. Once in Wales, she can hear a crying child outside the cottage, though she can find no trace of anyone in distress. Despite finding no child, the crying continues, and her dreams become filled with images of the child, lost and alone in the rainy woods.
Jess' dreams become more vivid and detailed, as she is subconsciously pulled into the terrifying world of Eigon, a young princess who is hiding from Roman soldiers along with her mother and siblings. These dreams compel Jess to research the history of the valley, and the area around her sister's cottage. Her investigations point to events that occurred approximately 2,000 years earlier, when Romans invaded the same valley, seeking to capture Caratacus, the warrior king of the Catuvellauni tribe. Eigon, Caratacus's young daughter, along with her mother, is brutally assaulted and left for dead by a small group of soldiers, and Jess finds herself a silent bystander to these events, as she follows them in dreams she can't avoid.
The similarities between Eigon's experiences and her own, coupled with mysterious happenings at the cottage, prompt Jess to follow Eigon to Rome, where the young princess was taken along with her parents.
The past and present become firmly interwoven as Jess' dreams continue to unfold in Rome, where she herself is still being pursued, and where Eigon, 2,000 years earlier, was faced with a dangerous stalker of her own. The threads of their lives, and those of the men chasing them, become firmly intertwined as Jess races to save not only her own life, but that of a princess who lived and died 2 millennia before her.
With an intricate plot that rarely slows, and suspense building throughout, The Warrior's Princess has the potential to be an engrossing read. Erskine shows her skills at weaving two disparate timelines into one seamless tale, and her historian background shines through, particularly in her well researched depictions of daily life in ancient Rome. She does an excellent job of incorporating the birth of Christianity, and the impact it had on the Romans, in a manner that fits neatly in the weft of the story.
That being said, her overly simple writing style and often maladroit scene transitions don't easily allow the reader to tumble deeply into The Warrior's Princess. This sense of remove is further exacerbated by the character of Jess, a singularly myopic woman, who begins as a helpless victim, and remains one, as she refuses to go to the police or even talk to her friends or family. It is hard to relate to a heroine who not only doesn't seek assistance, but who actively endangers herself repeatedly, at the same time rejecting what aid is offered. Too often, it feels like an authorial machination to maintain the suspense of the work, forcing the character to founder on her own when an efficient and common-sense solution to her peril is only a phone call away.
While this machination does add to the tension of the novel, it leaves Erskine appearing to scramble for resolution in the final 100 pages of the book, introducing characters seemingly out of nowhere who suddenly become key players in the plot, as she has left Jess in such an untenable position as a weak heroine that she is unable to resolve the plot on her own.
That's too bad: The Warrior's Princess has an intriguing premise and a solid grounding in historical research. It's never less than an interesting book, but stylistically it rarely rises above the quality of a middling TV movie of the week.
Cori Dusmann is an educator and writer living in Victoria, B.C.
