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    Langue[dot]doc 1305
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    Langue[dot]doc 1305
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    Langue[dot]doc 1305
    Ebook384 pages5 hours

    Langue[dot]doc 1305

    By Gillian Polack

    3.5/5

    ()

    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this ebook

    Time travel with a twist. A group of scientists travel to 14th century France… and the novel is written by a Medievalist.

    In March 1305, a group of Australians and Americans arrive in medieval France. To be precise, they arrive in the Languedoc, near a village called Saint-Guilhem-le-Desert.

    The scientists want to save the world. Dr Artemisia Wormwood wants to save her sister. If she joins the time-travellers as their historian, her pay would cover treatment that might give her sister life.

    Saint-Guilhem-le-Desert is a desert of souls. Village, monastery, pilgrimage path, and legend; that's all there is. Perfect for scientists who have promised their work will not interfere with history. Those scientists have nine months and a dedication that defies reason. They won't tell Artemisia about their research. They don't want to hear her explanations about the world around them and about its people. Some of the scientists don't even want her there. Who needs an historian when the village looks like a gamer's dream?

    The villagers are disturbed by the strangers. Most of the strangers don't really care.

    Prepare for a bumpy ride with bad coffee.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherBook View Cafe
    Release dateJul 17, 2018
    ISBN9781611387452
    Unavailable
    Langue[dot]doc 1305

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    Reviews for Langue[dot]doc 1305

    3.5/5

    5 ratings7 reviews

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    • 5/5
      I received this book through LibraryThing Early Reviewers Group in exchange for a fair and honest review.This is a meticulously researched time travel novel that is told without hyperbole and with a degree of realism that is staggering. It is a quiet novel, measured like the time it describes (Languedoc, France 1305), full of amazing detail about the daily lives of two seemingly very different groups of people - the modern protagonists and the Medieval villagers. It has an interesting focus for a time travel novel in that the bulk of the time travellers are a group of scientists uninterested in the history around them and their historian is there for bureaucratic reasons to ensure that the scientists don't disrupt history. Her knowledge of history and the local language is considered unimportant by the other time travellers and she is therefore an outsider in her group. In the Medieval village, her counterpart is a displaced knight struggling with deciding his future in the shadow of his past. It is their interaction that ends up being the crux of the novel but their experience of being outsiders and spectators on their respective groups is what gives this very well written novel depth as it runs the two stories together.The novel is beautifully paced - a slow burn to the genuinely shocking climax and the very satisfying conclusion . It is a quiet story - measured, realistic and believable without any forced crises to power the action. If time travel ever existed and ever occurred, it probably would be like this - tangled up in bureaucracy and the confusion of disparate people working at cross purposes.
    • 3/5
      Langue[dot]doc is about disquieting relationships in a team environment. The time traveling team in this book consists of research scientists who are narrowly focused on their own study to the exclusion of other team member disciplines. This dysfunctional focus led to the renunciation of certain members of the team as well as to reckless behavior that endangered the entire group. The Langue[dot]doc team was sent to the Rhone Valley area in Southeast France during the year 1305 using a modern-day time portal. Their goal was not fully defined in the book but a medieval historian sent along as a guide to period practices and culture was deemed unimportant by the scientists. Team members’ disregard of this particular specialist led to dangerous cultural conflicts with the local populace that ultimately resulted in one of the team members being accosted. Despite the means of travel, this book is not about time travel so much as it is about relationships. I had hoped to learn more about medieval society from the book than I did. With the narrative being more about the selfishness and self-importance of present-day team members, insufficient time was left to verbally illustrate 14th-century life. One thing that was evident is that people of that time were just as suspicious of outsiders as they are today. Anything of a negative nature that befell the town was blamed on the outsiders despite how improbable that seemed to the town’s leaders. Fear of people unlike us must be a human inborn trait. Langue[dot]doc was not difficult to read but its personal relationship focus did not appeal to me. It did make me somewhat appreciate early 14th small town life in the Languedoc area. But, I wanted to know more about how money transfers among wealthy landowners and their distant relatives was facilitated and about how commerce between the villages, towns, and cities was conducted. Were these woven into the story, it would have made for a more interesting read.
    • 2/5
      I enjoy books, movies, etc. about time travel, and I was looking forward to a version from a bonafide historian.Unfortunately, I was disappointed. The story involves a small team of scientists that is sent back in time to southern France in the year 1305. There they spend the entire time being petty and selfish while the main character mopes around feeling lonely and sorry for herself. Something more finally, and frankly unfortunately, occurs near the end of the book, but even it ends up being anticlimactic.
    • 3/5
      [Disclaimer: I got this book via LibraryThing Early Reviewer program]Gillian Polack is a medievalist. How could an author talk about Middle Age in a book? Usually she writes a historical novel. Polack chose instead a different approach: she sent some researchers from our near future in the Languedoc of 1305, for the first experiment of going back to the past. Protocol dictates that the researchers should not meddle with the local population, in order to avoid temporal paradoxes: needless to say, practice will be quite different and probably their very presence led to our known history. However, the book cannot be shelfed as SF, since it evolves around Middle Age. The story runs with a really slow pace: don't expect any dramatic plot, but this is no real problem. The description of life in Middle Age is interesting, as we could have guessed; what I found lacking is the lack of deepness of the characters. There is no main character: Artemisia the historian is what is most similar to such, but even her is just sketched without reaching any strong point. Moreover Polack decided every now and then to take the point of view of other characters, but just en passant, without any real interaction. I think all of it could have been described better.
    • 3/5
      A team of scientists have been sent back in time to the titular place and time, and they have a single historian with them – who was parachuted in at the last minute after the original two historian members of the team pulled out. Artemisia Wormwood, however, is not an expert on 14th-century Languedoc, but on mediaeval saints. Fortunately, she knows considerably more about the time and place than the scientists, who are there to refine their theory of time travel and investigate the natural environment. The team set up in a system of caves under a hill beside the village of St-Guilhelm-le-Désert and, while they keep apart from the villagers (only Wormwood speaks old French, and she does that haltingly), they make no secret of their presence. In fact, the scientists behave like a bunch of spoilt kids. They don’t seem to care about the impact they may be having on the lives of those in the village. Wormwood acts as an unofficial liaison between the two groups, via disgraced knight Guilhelm. This one is definitely a slow-burner. Not much happens during the course of the novel, it’s more a diary of incidents experienced by the time team. However, it definitely packs a sting in the tail. The prose is polished, Polack evokes her period extremely well, and the whole thing is very readable if somewhat languidly paced. I thoroughly enjoyed it.
    • 4/5
      Langue[dot]doc 1305 by Gillian Polack is a time-travel novel set mostly in 1305. It basically documents the expedition's stay in 1305 and the contemporaneous goings-on in the town of Languedoc. It is the second novel I've read by the author, the other was Ms Cellophane, which is unconnected. There are people involved. That's the first mistake. Scientists were never meant to be part of history. Anything in the past is better studied from the present. It's safer. When a team of Australian scientists — and a lone historian — travel back to St-Guilhem-le-Désert in 1305 they discover being impartial, distant and objective just doesn't work when you're surrounded by the smells, dust and heat of a foreign land. They're only human after all. But by the time Artemisia is able to convince other that it's time to worry, it's already too late.Langue[dot]doc 1305 is an unusual book. It's told in a series of short scenes, switching between characters from the present (or, I suppose, near future, since they can time travel) and townsfolk in 1305. Commonly such short scenes would be an indication of a fast-paced, action-heavy plot, but that is not the case here. It is not a long book, coming in at just under 300 pages, but it is a slow, languorous read. The short scenes (and I should note, not all of them a super-short, but many are) give snapshots of minor events both in the lives of the expedition and the locals. Although seemingly unconnected at first, these do tend to lay down context for later happenings.The characters are not at all what I expected. Artemisia, the only historian on the mission, is positioned very much as the main character, even as she is isolated from the rest of the expedition due to a clash of personalities and (research) culture. The scientists, quite frankly, often acted very pettily and put me in mind of the public servants in Ms Cellophane (in particular, I found similarities between the two antagonist characters). I felt like I should be on the side of the scientists (because I am one) but they were mostly such annoying people that I was very much on Artemisia's side throughout.Gillian Polack is a historian, specialising in Medieval France, so I have no doubt that all the history included was as accurate as possible. I am also quite sure that there were jokes that I didn't pick up on because I am not a historian, but that did not make it an unenjoyable read. Instead, I suspect others with a stronger medieval background will get more out of it than I did.I recommend Langue[dot]doc 1305 to anyone with a passing interest in history (especially Medieval France), speculative fiction reader or not. On the other hand, those looking for action and adventure would be better off looking elsewhere.4 / 5 stars
    • 4/5
      I liked this book very much while I was reading it (once I'd got the characters straight) but since I've finished I've thought about more things that weren't right. Although it is a book about time-travel that aspect is really only used to get the characters into a confined 'space' so that we can observe their actions and reactions. What I found more implausible than the time-travel was the dishonest and unethical behaviour of the scientists - or perhaps I'm naive and that is the way some scientists behave?