Mrs. Mack, Mrs. Enderby, and Mrs. Shaw are all minor characters in the mainline St. Mary’s book, and here they tell the story that we roughly know from The Very First Damned Thing. The Battersea Barricades starts with Mrs. Enderby and Mrs. Shaw describing how they wanted to get involved with an low-key rebellion, “where they threw the Fascists out of Cardiff” and met Mrs. Mack. They jump right into the story without giving a lot of rationale for why the Fascists were in power in the first place – they describe it as more creeping Fascism that seems innocuous at first, then later shows its ugly head.
Overall this is a decent short story if you care about the characters, but it is far outside the mainstream St. Mary’s novel. There is no time jump, no Mr. Markham, no Chief Ferrel, no Tim Peterson. The narrative is somewhat jumbled, as fits the characters’ feelings and actions at the time, but we don’t see an overview as to the rest of England.
The ending was weird and felt pushed together. Mrs. Mack, Mrs. Enderby and Mrs. Shaw stopped the slow-motion civil war by jumping on a crashed bus and standing with the Union Jack in front of a very menacing gun helicopter. It reminds me of the Tienanmen Square picture with the one man facing down a line of tanks. We always salute the courage of the man who faced the tanks, but we need to remember there are two heroes in that picture – with the second one being the man commanding that first tank. It took moral courage for him to stand down, to say no. And just the same way it takes courage for the helicopter pilot to back off.
Now in the ending the helicopter comes back without guns – same pilot? who knows? and salutes the ladies. Very nice but not very satisfying. It felt as if Jodi Taylor needed to bring the story to a graceful end so she used that method.
The ladies were young in The Battersea Barricades and show determination and grit, but not the skill and ability to navigate through the St. Mary’s world that we see them display in all the books, especially A Trail Through Time, an Argumentation of Historians. It is as if Mrs. Enderby and Mrs. Shaw are playing Max’s role, that of the serious disaster magnet. It doesn’t quite work.
I’m giving this 4 stars; I’ll re-read it (as I do every St. Mary’s book, multiple times) but it just isn’t quite the same caliber as the rest of the short stories or novels in the series.
Leave a Reply