The story is so well known, in fact, that Penman mentions in her afterword that she was in the enviable position of being able to allow a lot of her characters to "speak for themselves, in their own words," since there is so much material available on the era and on these particular events. But something that ought to have been a real strength somehow turns around and wounds the book deeply. There is little trace here of Penman's ability of bringing historical characters, and through them their era, alive in the mind of the reader. Instead of the sense of watching real events unfold before a reader's eyes, what emerges is something akin to the Bayeux tapestry -- wonderfully crafted, to be sure, exquisite to behold, but dead and stiff nonetheless, only a representation of the reality on which it was based.

This is not to say that Time and Chance is a bad book, or that it is badly written -- like everything Penman writes, this is masterfully crafted, with a fine sense of period and the people who inhabit it. However, when it comes to Henry and Eleanor, and Thomas Beckett, this is not enough. Too much else has been said and written on the subject of Beckett's murder, and a character like Eleanor of Aquitaine is too larger-than-life for any book dealing with these to be simply good enough. To stand out, it has to be extraordinary. Despite her considerable and well-documented gifts, Penman has not written that extraordinary book. It feels as though the author was tired (she does say that the reason the book was such a long time coming was because of an extended illness) or -- as unlikely as that might sound -- uninspired by her subject matter. What emerges is a decent historical novel, but not a Penman Special Event. This isn't enough to stop me from keeping an eye out for any new Sharon Penman book that hits the bookstores -- but Time and Chance, despite its overwhelming promise and its setting in one of the most dramatic periods of European medieval history, was a disappointment.