Another Space in Time

< This memoir is one of little vignettes set in different times and places as Burns’s life took him around the world. At times the stories are very ‘familiar’ to one of my age and relative privilege, as we baby-boomers have seen the world open out under the blast of the airline jet engine. However, they should appeal to a much wider audience. Burns is good at drawing one into his observations of times and places, now changed or changing, so helping one appreciate the ups and downs of living his sort of middle-class, often-relocated, lifestyle. Nowadays, travel seems to be ever more routine and ever less exotic, and of course it never has been all fun. Burns spares us from many of the mundane difficulties, the personal psychology, of constantly moving a family from one short foreign posting to another, a burden that anyway regularly falls heaviest on partners and young families. This is a book of twenty random assembled short stories taken from a full and industrious life, th...

    This is classic Steampunk genre with a morality tale or two, writ large. The young teenaged, Beatrix, escapes a suitably Dickensian circus to travel the world on a multi-story dirigible, a craft common to so much of the genre.     The adventure, the search for the long-hidden artefact, is entertaining, even though the elements that build the story are somewhat contrived and sometimes less than well knitted together. However, the words themselves are nicely knotted and well cast-off. A ‘Victorian’ tone is achieved and displayed well enough, onto which is painted vivid pictures of both the cast of characters and the world in which they are played. Comedy is a consisted chord, tongue-in-cheek rather than riotously funny. The Colonel is all comic foil, a wild mix of Phileas Fogg, MacDonald Frazer’s Flashman, and Captain Pugwash. It is his eccentricity rather than any string of logic that binds the book.     I am mystified as to what age group the au...