A Tapestry of Time

The White Bird of Kinship #3

by Richard Cowper

The first coming was the second was Fire to burn Him;The third was water to drown the Fire;The fourth is the Bird of Dawning.Twenty years have passed since the martyrdom of the Boy-piper at York, twenty years in which his legacy, the movement of Kinship, has challenged the tyranny of the Church Militant in Britain's seven island kingdoms.Now his namesake, Tom, bearing the Boy's own pipes and perhaps himself imbued with the spirit of the White Bird, is wandering Europe in company with the girl, Witchet. But disaster overtakes them and Tom, in a fury of vengeance, breaks his vow of Kinship.A terrible path lies before him, one that transcends his own world. As he travels it, Tom must come to understand the true nature of the wild White Bird, of The Bride of Time and her Child, and of the Song the Star Born sang.

Genres: Fantasy, Science Fiction, Fiction

183 pages, Kindle Edition

First published January 1, 1982

About the author

Pen name for John Middleton Murry Jr.

Reviews

[Michael O'Donnell · Rating 2 out of 5]

Plot summary: Tom and Witchet wander aimlessly around Europe. Nothing much happens. The end.
No scheming Church Militant, no evil Falcons, just much metaphysical musing. Oh, and the scientists from the past are replaced by historians from the future.
If you have already read the first two parts of this trilogy you are not missing much if you skip this final part.

[Jeff Crosby]

The Road to Corlay was wonderful. This third book in the series is awful.

[David · Rating 3 out of 5]

The issue with the book is that the the author ran out of story and tacked on a rather sub-par treasure hunt in a near identical future as his present except replace "Catholic" with "Kinship".

Specifically he stops the main story of Tom, the piper's son,"Child of the Bride of Time" and bearer of "the Boy's own pipes", a continuation of a rather rich, deep and mystical series of events going all the way back to the childhood of the boy under the tutelage of Morfedd the Wizard, and without properly exploring the many fragmented and semi island Kingdoms Britain had broken into, jumps several centuries into the future.

It's already jarring none of the characters we have to deal with for a good chunk of the book have any connection to the characters we've followed since "The Road to Corlay". It's even more annoying to have them constantly scoff at the events we read about in the series and relegate them to the status of myth or fairy tale. But what is even more infuriating than that is that Cowper decides to toss aside any and all ideas for invention and world building provided to him by a post apocalyptic society regressed to medievalism and instead he just has a future Britain that is basically an exact replica of the "contemporary" Britain of the time he was writting it in.

There's nothing special or interesting, just that the majority religion is now Kinship, with Christianity not getting even a passing mention, which is weird considering all the infighting we've had for 2 & 1/2 books between the two, you'd think there'd be some holdout. But even so, Kinship is here turned into Christianity with the serial numbers filled off, so there's nothing interesting about that either. It reads like an antiquarian and his friend/future wife going on a quest for an old relic that could have been set in early 20th Century Britain and there'd be no difference.

And that is a shame. Because this part of the book, while not badly written per se, jettisons all creativity and invention from the series and ends on a rather typical, unremarkable note.

It is weird how only the second book of the series could stand on it's own without some weird element centuries apart from the main setting intruding in, be it the random "present day" incursion of a comatose man into the head of a would-be drowned Kinsman and the constant flashbacks to his hospital bed, or this random flashforward of a good few centuries.

I can't give it 2 stars because the first half of the book is still good and continues the story of Tom and the Passage of the Pipes, but I would give it 2.5 stars if I could for the book's tacked on 2nd half.

[Alex · Rating 3 out of 5]

‘They all turned their heads and saw two caped and hooded figures emerging from the trees about a hundred metres up the slope to their right. Between them they were carrying a pole and suspended from it by the legs …’

From my review of the first book in The White Bird of Kinship series
‘It’s a fantasy story set on the British Isles, now the Seven Kingdoms. The Drowning has already ended the Isles we know. The setting is in a time we would categorise as the dark ages, with the Church Militant, soldiers on horseback, peasants in homesteads, inns, and hard times for all.

Tom [the boy piper] is said to be the harbinger of a prophecy regarding the White Bird of Kinship, foretold to come at the beginning of the third millennium.’

Series continuity
There is a thread of continuity in the series, and A Tapestry of Time (ATOT) is no exception, bridging events from one time period to another to immerse the legend of the White Bird of Kinship into human history. Instead of bridging the gap between the Drowning and the Seven Kingdoms, we’re now looking at the end of the Seven Kingdoms and what legacy it leaves on humankind many years in the future.

Praise
For the first 124 pages, I was riveted. There was a narrative here that followed on from the events in the second book. Tom still has his friendships with David and Witchet, and an incident tests them all. Lost innocence felt to be a prominent theme, where love and death was concerned. I wanted to know who would live, what powers these pipes really had when they were in Tom’s possession, and what difference it would make to the world. Or, just, really, how the story was going to unfold.

Criticism
After the first 124 pages, we fast forward to the future, and my interest in the different characters was flat, even if there was a budding romance between them. I did like the miracle that bound them together, however, I felt the delivery of the prose, in the form of repeated letters and conversations, went away from the style I was used to in this series.

There were some interesting links that give us an insight into what had happened in the past, but it was what a reader may have suspected from Tom’s meeting with the leaders of the faith.

Overall
ATOT is worth reading. The adventure continues, and if you’ve liked what you’ve read in the series before I can’t imagine you’d be disappointed with the majority of what you read. It’s not the best book in the series, but then, I felt the second book did set the bar high.

[Benj · Rating 3 out of 5]

A disappointing ending to the White Bird of Kinship trilogy. Too much time was spent in Tom's dark and confusing inner world, with nothing much resolved.

The concluding Cartwright Papers were sweet, but didn't really add anything to the story.

[Mr Martyn · Rating 4 out of 5]

Not as good as the previous two books in the series, but still pleasantly readable

[Kerry · Rating 4 out of 5]

I finished my first major reread of an old but favourite series today. And I loved it all over again. It can be such a dangerous feeling, going back to books you loved 25-30 years ago. Will they hold up? Will you get that same sense of wonder? Has the (as Jo Walton calls it in her blogs on Tor.com) "suck fairy" visited?

As I said in my review for A Dream of Kinship, I've been collecting up as ebooks my old favourites from my "hey day" of reading, which was my late teens and early twenties (also know as the mid-80s to mid-90s) as they are published as ebooks, sometimes as a self-published book by the author, sometimes as part of a publisher's backlist and sometimes as a first electronic release from a new publisher. I'm building up a lovely collection of favourite authors including such names as M.K. Wren, Kate Elliott, Greg Bear, Katharine Kerr, Melissa Scott and Barbara Hambly. And I'm going to try to make 2014 I really dig into that collection and get on with some rereading.

I will face down the suck fairy and hopefully it will retreat defeated.

This series totally did retain the wonder and I'm so glad I have indeed reread it. I don't know if I realised when I first read it (I was a lot younger then), that the trilogy as a whole is a study of how religions develop, struggle to survive and, if they do survive, codify into tradition that may or may not be a true and correct vision of the original revelation. It took me until this third book for me to realise it even this time, but once I did, I was more impressed than ever before. I immediately had to go back to the prologue of the first book, so see how what it said needed to be reinterpreted in light of the end of the third book. That must surely be the sign of something with some meat and depth to it.

One thing I find extremely fascinating is that, given the above reading of the theme of the trilogy, I find myself left to wonder what effect the new "revelation" at the end of this book will have on the world within it and if, as the epilogue suggests, that effect is major, does it simply start the cycle over again.

Of course, that is a question for the reader to ponder, not one for the author to give away. I doubt he ever had an answer (and it is too late to ask him as he died in 2002) and instead left this rhetorical question on purpose. After all, good books should make us think.

This trilogy is a lovely blend of a fantasy tale with references both to the past and the future of the world within the books. The "prologue" and "epilogue" help to expand the middle part of the tale into something much bigger than simply the adventures of the characters. It might be 30 years old, but it still packs a punch. The only reason this volume didn't get 10/10 is that I struggled with Tom's metaphysical/otherworldly journey. I got the point, but the prose was a bit of a struggle.

Just be aware that the Gollancz ebook edition of this is pretty terrible. It's full of scanning errors and the first page of the end matter of the book is inserted before the very end of the story, making the Kindle think I was finished and asking me to rate the book. I was okay because I'd read it before, but I was still heard to mutter "but that isn't the end!" in a disgruntled voice. I paged forward and suddenly the text returned to finish of the tale before going back to the rest of the end matter. The first two books in the trilogy had a few scanning errors here and there, but many old works do and I could live with them. The problems with this one were much worse to the degree that I feel I need to point it out. I had read it before and had my old paperback for reference, so I was fine. If you're coming to this cold, it might just cause confusion. As always, this doesn't alter my rating in any way, as that isn't fair on the story or the author, but poor work, Gollancz.

[Sue · Rating 3 out of 5]

The conclusion to the White Bird of Kinship series (book three of the trilogy). The book wanders too much without clear direction or plot - both literally because the hero spends a lot of time wandering aimlessly both in the physical world (traveling musician) and in some netherworld (populated primarily by people dead or nearly dead); and figuratively as the plot meanders almost as much as it hero does in search of "who am I?" The best thing about A Tapestry of Time is the postscript from the even further distant future when Kinship has become an established religion just like Catholicism was when Kinship developed.

[David Hirt · Rating 4 out of 5]

Good religious fiction in that it is fiction about a religion that is not Christianity though there are ties. It isn't a book written to be fiction in a Christian world.

[Tanya · Rating 3 out of 5]

Not sure I ever got through the last of the series. It was interesting but slow. The whole series as a Jesus-Christianity allegory.

[SciFiOne · Rating 2 out of 5]

1989 grade D-