The Daughter of Time

[sawyl]

I'm not going to say much about Josephine Tey's The Daughter of Time, partly because it's something of a classic and partly because my ignorance of (and lack of interest in) history is such that I don't feel qualified to comment on the details of the story.

The book opens with Alan Grant stuck in hospital, on his back with a broken leg and a bruised spine. In order to deal with the boredom of his rest cure, Grant develops a fascination with Richard III and sets out to rescue his reputation from the revisionism of the Tudors. Assisted by Brent Carradine, a young American who does leg work for him at the British Library, Grant uncovers enough information to convince him that the princes in the tower weren't killed by Uncle Richard, but rather murdered by Henry Tudor's men.

It's interesting how the novel feels like a product of another age; one when hospitals routinely prescribed long periods of bed rest, when libraries and card catalogues were the only way to access information, and when it was necessary to send your agent down to the BL to look things up on your behalf. These days, I suspect, Grant would have busied himself for all of five minutes on wikipedia before returning bored to his dogmatic slumbers, all his questions answered.