Time’s convert
Thirst world problems
released 18 sepTeMber 448 pages | Hardback/ebook
Author deborah Harkness Publisher Headline
Anyone who’s read about vampires knows they can’t help multiplying with increasingly awful consequences, and the same is true of vampire novels. Deborah Harkness’s A Discovery Of Witches and its two follow-ups covered the romance between vampire Matthew Clairmont and witch Diana Bishop; this first novel in a sequel series mostly focuses on Matthew’s “son” Marcus.
It’s basically a soap opera, with three main strands: Marcus’s beloved’s transition to being a vampire, Marcus exploring memories of his early existence as both a human and vampire, and Matthew and Diana grappling with working out what powers their toddler twins might have. The only real grit comes during Marcus’s recollections. When he describes his abusive father, you get a genuine sense of the awful uncertainty of living with someone so unpredictable, the fear for the other people who have to endure the same situation. Once he leaves home to fight in the American War of Independence the gore ramps up, but the emotional engagement decreases, as Marcus’s connection to his fellow fighters never feels as deep, so their loss never feels as significant. The more his story is told, the less engaging it becomes.
As for the other storylines, the tale of two super-privileged people “struggling” to understand their infants is sweet but banal, and Phoebe’s transition to vampirehood so perfectly slick and glossy it’s actually irritating. There’s no drama to either of these narratives. They’re just beautiful people enjoying first-world problems in a beautiful world. Even when Phoebe gets sucked back in to her previous existence by a family emergency, she’s detached from it, sliding in to look gorgeously unhappy, then sliding back out to leave her still-human relatives to deal with the mess.
In the end, Time’s Convert lacks humanity, and without it there’s no way to explore what becoming a vampire means, either for Phoebe or Marcus. Vampirism is just a golden ticket to the “eternal youth and bottomless wallet” club, and the reader will be the one left with their hunger unsated.
An eight-part adaptation of Harkness’s A Discovery Of Witches starts airing on Sky One from Friday 14 September.