A TIME AWAY FROM TIME, Michael Banister’s historical adventure novel with a fantastical twist, opens in the year 1500. Father Martim Rodrigo, a recently retired Portuguese priest, has returned to his homeland from his beloved Mogadishu, Somalia, where he has spent several decades as the parish priest of a small Catholic congregation. What Father Rodrigo finds upon his homecoming leaves him profoundly troubled: during his long absence, the Kingdom of Portugal has become a colonial empire—the first European power to do so—its ships establishing trade routes and colonies along the African coast and giving rise to the Atlantic slave trade. For the compassionate, kind-hearted priest, the discovery that his beloved kingdom has embraced slavery fills him with shock and outrage. Worse still for Rodrigo, he has been “loaned” three enslaved persons—27-year-old Maryam, 30-year-old Sofia, and 32-year-old Khadijah—sisters from the African nation of Mali, a once-mighty nation weakened by power struggles between regional rulers and subsequently invaded by the Portuguese.
In the first of the story’s startling developments, Rodrigo’s introduction to the Malian sisters serves as the catalyst for an astonishing scheme. It so happens that the priest is in possession of a wondrous device: a spherical astrolabe, an astronomical instrument of Eastern Islamic origin used by explorers as a sort of early GPS navigation tool. This particular astrolabe, however, has a miraculous secret function: the ability to transport its user back and forth through time. Father Rodrigo proposes sending the sisters 54 years into the past to the year 1446, before Portugal’s domination of West Africa. There, the sisters will warn the Malian ruler of the time about the impending arrival of the Portuguese, and convince him to assemble a fighting force to repel the European invaders and put a stop to the slave trade in its infancy. It’s a daring idea—but the time machine is broken, and the only person who might be able to repair it is Gabriel Hugo, an elderly French jeweler. In order for Rodrigo’s plan to work, they must somehow get the astrolabe to Gabriel and hope that the craftsman is able to restore its time-traveling powers. So begins a spirited adventure through a small but momentous period of history, woven with encounters with such real-life historical figures as explorer Vasco da Gama and Nicolas Flamel, the alchemist believed to have discovered the Philosopher’s Stone and achieved immortality. (Harry Potter fans may be surprised to learn that Flamel was—or is?—a real person.)
From the opening pages of A TIME AWAY FROM TIME, it’s clear that the author knows his way around an adventure tale. Banister, who served as a Peace Corps volunteer in Ethiopia, has clearly done his homework. The novel is brimming with historical details, but it’s not immune to the familiar pitfalls of heavily-researched books. The story is exposition-heavy, especially in the first several chapters, and characters have a tendency to speak in extended information dumps that drag down the pacing. The book also suffers from the occasional editing glitch, such as a knife that disappears and reappears within an action scene, or dialogue that contradicts itself from one page to the next. These are minor flaws, however, in an otherwise solidly written yarn. Banister has a natural storyteller’s knack for stringing plot points together in tantalizing fashion, each chapter leaving the reader in a state of eager anticipation.
Given the novel’s subject matter, it would be irresponsible not to address the thorny questions a story like this may pose to prospective readers. Does Banister, who is not African, treat the topic of slavery with sensitivity? Is the novel guilty of cultural appropriation? Does it employ white savior tropes? While this reviewer is not qualified to make those judgment calls, nothing in A TIME AWAY FROM TIME leaps out as glaringly insensitive or problematic. Banister treats his characters with compassion and empathy, and while Father Rodrigo is a pivotal character, the bulk of the story centers around the three sisters, never objectifying them or undermining their agency. There is plenty of violent action throughout, but it’s depicted in a fairly restrained, PG-13 fashion.
A genuine page-turner, Michael Banister’s A TIME AWAY FROM TIME is a crackerjack historical fantasy-adventure built around an irresistible “what if?” hook that shines a light on an under-explored chapter of history.
~Edward Sung for IndieReader