The Daughter of Time by Josephine Tey
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
From the point of view of the present (or the book’s present) we have a contingent view (was Richard III a murderer of his own nephews)… and this view is one we use to go back and determine the past. That is, this view is used to anchor the discourse of how to organize the past… all other events become secondary to this present view, one that apparently was not upheld in the past, or at least, not in the same way.
Confusing at first, I didn’t realize that this was part of a series of books in which we the reader are to already know Inspector Grant. All the same, a light read, one in which the “actuality” of the character’s emotions tell us how we should read the revealed history of Richard III as it appears to us in fragments. As Tey shows us, it is this process of revealing and this process of indeterminate motives that history and mystery both collapse together along the same narrative chain. Her grasp of this chain is what makes this an excellent exercise in craft.
Not particularly trilling in an intellectual sense, but easy to read because of her excellence.
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