Timeline - Crichton, MichaelSummary: Michael Crichton's new novel opens on the threshold of the twenty-first century. It is a world of exploding advances on the frontiers of technology. Information moves instantly between two points, without wires or networks. Computers are built from single molecules. Any moment of the past can be actualized -- and a group of historians can enter, literally, life in fourteenth-century
feudal France. Imagine the risks of such a journey.
Booklist Reviews
Crichton sets himself another technical challenge: plausibly taking a group of characters 600 years into the past. This shouldn't be too much of a chore for the man who brought dinosaurs back to life, but readers familiar with his work will note that he seems to struggle a bit harder than usual to sell the premise, as though he's having a hard time buying it himself. Once that's out of the way, though, the novel is a splendid read. The plot is pretty straightforward: Edward Johnson, a history professor, is stranded in France in the year 1357, and a trio of his graduate students must go back to extricate him. Unlike some writers, Crichton doesn't use his historical setting merely as window dressing. He immerses his characters, and his readers, in the past: its politics, its language, its social structure, even the way it looks (early scenes, in which the young grad students marvel at being in this place they've only seen as ancient ruins, are realistic and, for any reader with an interest in history, thrilling). The story itself, which involves a French siege upon an English castle (England controlled France at the time), is packed with adventure and surprises.
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