Informative speech transcript from student Norah Marstall
When I read The Gideon Trilogy by Mrs. Buckley-Archer, the books sucked me in. I enjoyed the first book, devoured the second, and at the end of the third, I cried because it really was the end. I had grown to love the characters and story so much, it was painful to say goodbye. Understand this: I rarely cry at the end of books. Strange, how you can sniffle over a morally-decrepit highwayman…
The Gideon Trilogy is great fantasy, but not just normal fantasy—time travel fantasy. It is a great time travel story for three reasons: its comprehension, realism, and respect.
Reason first: comprehension. I have always liked the idea of time travel, but the stories I’ve read about it often present time travel in a messy tangle of parts. By the end of these time travel stories, you are pressed to just enjoy them, because you are now focused on understanding the complicated way time travel works. What The Gideon Trilogy does so well is make the time travel system both fun and fairly easy to follow. By the end of the series, you have a good grip on how all the parts work. There still remains mystery, but there will always be mystery when it comes to fantasy.
The second reason I love these books is the realism. In The Gideon Trilogy, the characters react to time travel in a delightful way. Few things annoy me more than the belief humans were stupider in past centuries and that we are turning into a more sophisticated race. I don’t know about you, but whenever I hear someone say “the Dark Ages”, I cringe to my very core. This belief dishonors all humans, past and present. Our ancestors made living possible for us. They carved the way forward, not as ignorant animals, but as men and woman seeking for truth and wondering at the world around them. We are standing on the shoulders of giants. Human nature does not change, no matter the century. There were fools in the past—there are plenty of fools now.
Mrs. Buckley-Archer paints a beautiful picture of the similarities and dissimilarities of two centuries. The story focuses on our time and the 1760s. The way the eighteenth century characters become excited about the future is contagious. I wonder with them at the marvel of horseless carriages, mobile phones, and television sets, not because I have never heard of them, but because I can put myself in the shoes of a French marquis or an English highwayman as they experience the future. And even though Peter and Kate, two kids from the twenty-first century, miss modern conveniences when they are swept into the eighteenth, they find they can adapt to a certain extent. Characters centuries apart befriend one another and discover the advantages and drawbacks of their centuries. Beauty reveals itself in both times, but also ugliness. Every century, past, present and future, is a mixed bag. In every century, humankind has wondered, and Aristotle says that knowledge begins with wondering. People have wondered about the world since its beginning, and I am afraid people from 1763 are no exception.
In every century, there are things we do not know. We are not God, and we have limitations. Our minds are affected by our times and are pressed to imagine other times. In The Gideon Trilogy, the boy Peter tells his eighteenth-century friend, Gideon, that when you call 999, policemen come to your rescue. A little later, Gideon stands up and shouts, “Nine, nine, nine!” into the air. He turns to Peter to tell him that calling 999 does not work in this century. This is a good picture of how a person from the past would react when they heard of a modern invention. They would be curious, amused, and incredulous, all at once, just as you or I might act if someone centuries in the future told us something…but, who knows, we might just be depressed at how the world will end up.
The final reason The Gideon Trilogy is well-crafted time travel fantasy is the respect for the past. Not only is there an intimacy with older centuries because of human nature’s unchangeability, but Buckley-Archer stresses the sacredness of the past. Throughout the trilogy, one character in particular tries to protect the past from change. The past is something that should be a certainty, but it is no longer a certainty when we corrupt it. In the third book of the series, the villain, Lord Luxon, twists the past for his own gain and time falls apart. Even though we cannot actually travel back in time and change events, we do twist the past for our own gain. We deny truth and uphold propaganda. This is just as tragic as a timequake. We cannot know ourselves if we do not understand the past, and if we muddle the past we muddle our understanding of human nature. Studying true history is vital for being human, because history is about human nature. Be warned, there are Lord Luxons out there, lying about the past for their own gain.
The Gideon Trilogy is a packet of delightful characters and fantasy. By the time I had finished it, I felt a new love for the men who have gone before. These books reminded me how human nature brands us all with the same mark, and how our times affect us. Reading The Gideon Trilogy, I had been immersed in a polite, rational, none-too-good-smelling eighteenth century and had rediscovered the wonders of the modern world through the eyes of a rogue far from home.
