Time and Chance

Anglican Theological Review, Fall 2002 by Newman, Sharan

Time and Chance. By Sharon Kay Penman. New York: Putnam Publishing Group, 2002. 515 pp. $27.95 (cloth).

For the past twenty years, Sharon Kay Penman has brought the Middle Ages to life for readers who would never willingly take a history course or read an academic study. Starting with The Sunrise in Splendour in 1982, she has told the story of England's kings and queens through accurate and passionate fiction.

Time and Chance is the second novel in a proposed trilogy covering the mid-twelfth century. The first, When Christ and His Saints Slept, tells of the time of the Anarchy and the battle between Matilda, daughter of Henry I, and her cousin, Stephen of Blois, for the crown of England. While Penman uses the historical characters as her protagonists in this book, she also has an important fictional character, Ranulf, a bastard son of Henry I by a Welsh woman. Ranulf is a focal point so that the reader may grasp the personal conflict in one man who is forced to choose a side in a civil war even though he has friends and family in both camps. While the constraints of historical record govern the actions of the main players, Penman is free to make Ranulf a twelfth-century Everyman.

In Time and Chance it appears that Ranulf's loyalty conflict is solved by the death of Stephen and the ascension of Matilda's son, Henry II. Ranulf has married a Welsh cousin, Rhiannon, and dreams of nothing more than staying with her on their estate. Instead lie finds himself drawn into Henry's wars, against the Welsh border lords, against the lords of Aquitaine, and finally, against the Archbishop of Canterbury, Thomas a Becket. His Welsh connections allow Penman to introduce the reader to a lesser known part of Britain and to remind readers that other events were of importance to the people of the day and that not every eye was continually turned toward the English court.

Penman's great gift is in being able to present the struggles of the period through the eyes of all the main players. She presents few real villains. The reader watches the struggles of Henry, Eleanor, Becket, and a host of other historical figures as if they were all old friends. She understands the underlying reasons for the conflicts so well that she is able to present them in a smooth narrative that is accessible to lay readers and intriguing to scholars. She manages to intersperse primary accounts throughout without breaking the flow of the story.

While the main plot of Time and Chance is the struggle between Becket and Henry, Eleanor's life is also an important thread. In this and in her wonderful mysteries, Penman seems to have a better grasp on the personality of this medieval superstar than many of her recent biographers. I am eager to see what Penman does with the final battles between Henry, Eleanor, and their sons. I wish we had more novelists who were so meticulous in their research and more historians who could write so engagingly.

SHARAN NEWMAN

Portland, Oregon