Short Science Fiction Story Review – Roseann Rabinowitz – The Bells Of The Harelle

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2015 – Mammoth – Robinson’s Press – Spoiler alerts A story covering more than 30 years from 1382 to 1414. During the rise of the Spanish Inquisition, a group of heretical radicals wage a war of attrition against their hard-line Catholic oppressors, but they are losing. With many of her friends captured, betrayed, exiled or executed, one girl maintains a dangerous affair with two bisexual men. During a siege, when separated from her lovers she receives a warning to flee in the form of a peeling bell ringing session that only she seems to hear. Years later she joins other heretics with modern ideas way ahead of their time, including notions of an earth that circles the sun and evolutionary theories. There are also notions of how messages can be carried by telepathic powers right across time so when the warning bell is sounded again is the heroine receiving warning from the past or is the warning from her future going back in time? Ambiguous and a little confusing – many characters are not fleshed out enough, and the unusual ménage-trios set up in a time when such was considered highly dangerous is not explored properly at all. Arthur Chappell