Overtime: Introducing the greatest performer of all time and a half

by Tom Holt

Only in a Tom Holt novel can you discover the relationship between the Inland Revenue, the Second Crusade and God's great plan to build starter planets for first time life forms...

It all started for Guy Goodlet somewhere over Caen. One moment he was heading for the relative safety of the coast, aware that fuel was low and the Mosquito had more than a few bullet holes in it. The next, his co-pilot was asking to be dropped off. This would have been odd if Peter had still been alive. Since he was dead, it was downright worrying.

But not quite as worrying as when Guy found himself somewhere in the High Middle Ages - rather than in 1943 - in the company of one John de Nesle.
Unsurprisingly, Guy's first thought was to get out and home sharpish. But then he saw John's sister, Isoud, and somehow found himself agreeing to help John, also known as Blondel, in his quest to find Richard Coeur de Lion...

Genres: Fantasy, Humor, Fiction, Comedy, Time Travel, Novels, Science Fiction Fantasy

312 pages, Paperback

First published January 28, 1993

About the author

Tom Holt (Thomas Charles Louis Holt) is a British novelist.
He was born in London, the son of novelist Hazel Holt, and was educated at Westminster School, Wadham College, Oxford, and The College of Law, London.
Holt's works include mythopoeic novels which parody or take as their theme various aspects of mythology, history or literature and develop them in new and often humorous ways. He has also produced a number of "straight" historical novels writing as Thomas Holt and fantasy novels writing as K.J. Parker.

Reviews

[Amy Laurens · Rating 3 out of 5]

Overview
Time travel. Fantasy. Investments. Missing kings, tax evasions, singing wandering bards, inter-time concerts, badly negotiated contracts, lust-at-first-sight that the MC realises is Very Bad, an intensely unique universe... This is about the best I can do to sum up Holt's Overtime. It's twisty, it's convoluted, and it's a fun romp through a wacky world where nothing and no-one is as it seems.

Belatedly, I found a good summary of this story in the fantasy encyclopedia I got for Christmas: Richard Lionheart's Blondel seeks for him in all the wrong centuries. :)

First Impressions
First impressions were good, actually. The book gets off to a very promising start, involving a somewhat comic situation with a dead body in an aeroplane, of all things. The tone is light-hearted and quick-witted, and you get all squiggly thinking about the sheer fun the book promises.

High Points
Well, it certainly has its amusing moments. The twists of the plot are fresh and surprising, it's funny, clever, and very, very different.

Low Points
Sadly, the second half of the book is a little lacking. It's a fun read, no doubt about it, but the overarching plot lacks a sense of consistency and coherency. I get the main point of the plot, but I'm still left with the question -- Why?? And what did that particular subplot have to do with the price of fish? Not to mention the fact that the final chapter wraps things up in a less-than-satisfactory manner...

Rating
Eh. I'd say a bus book: it's funny and useful for when you have nothing better to do and don't mind laughing a little in public. Not something for dedicated pocket-reading, though :)

[Melissa McShane · Rating 2 out of 5]

I think I need to set boundaries on my Tom Holt reading. Specifically, I need to stop reading his early works, because I really don't like them. They seem unfunny and tedious to me. In this case, the main character was kind of a wet blanket, the other main character was surprisingly bland for a rock star, and I never got interested in the story. I don't know why the gags (like the robot "agents" who kept dying and being reassembled, or the fact that Guy invariably hit the hat of anyone he aimed at, regardless of where said hat was) fell flat, but they just didn't work for me. I like Tom Holt's work, but I don't think he really hit his stride until 2000 or so.

[Riju Ganguly · Rating 2 out of 5]

Take several jokes, gags and puns. Use a stand-up comedian to mix them into a concotion of ten minutes. You get lots of likes in YouTube etc.
Follow the same formula and strech it, in the garb of a historical fantasy, to a three hundred plus page doorstopper. You get a Tom Holt book, dubbed as 'funny' in the blurbs, but where all the jokes are on you.
It seems that K.J Parker is a much superior Avatar of Tom Holt, where he plays to his strengths in a shorter format. On the other hand, these novels...
Not recommended, really.

[Stacey · Rating 4 out of 5]

First, I have read several Tom Holt books, both new (Youspace series) and old (Omnibus sets). If you have never read a Tom Holt book, do not start with this one. Having an understanding of Holt’s writing style is key to following this story. It took me until about halfway through to really understand the plot and characters.

That said, I definitely enjoyed this book. True to Holt, it was funny, at times satirical, and full of time and space play. I liked the dynamic between Guy and Isoud, as well as the self-destructing henchmen. Holt’s use of time travel is a precursor to his use of the multiverse in the Youspace series.

In conclusion, after you’ve read a few of Holt’s newer books, travel back to this one.

[Olly Colluphid · Rating 3 out of 5]

Pleasurable read but ... It falls a little flat and I don't know why. Maybe I just wasn't in the mood for silliness. Too complicated without a good resolution is another possibility.

[Lynne · Rating 3 out of 5]

A story ala Douglas Adams, but instead of a whirlwind tour of the cosmos, this is a whirlwind tour through history. A farcical romp to try to find Richard the Lion-hearted who has been kidnapped and imprisoned by an unknown opponent. Composer Jean de Nesle has been given the task of finding him, and he in turn recruits Guy Goodlet, a WWI bomber pilot intercepted in time and space as his plane is going down off the coast of England. Like the game Marco Polo, wherever he goes, de Nesle must sing the first stanza of his composition "L'amour Dont Sui Epris" to receive the answering refrain from King Richard if he is within hearing distance, so that his location may be uncovered and he be found and saved.

The story includes some actual events and names of people in history. Being a fan of absurd stories, I read several chapters into the book but couldn't figure out what in the world was going on. But as i continued reading, I was laughing at the predicaments and dialogue, and got totally caught up in the idea of time travel. Jean de Nesle has a map of the tunnel of time that has entrances and exits through doors that we often come upon each day marked, "Do Not Enter. Staff Only." Tom Holt is a connoisseur of absurdity, in life, petty bureaucracies and in history.

[Alex Durston · Rating 4 out of 5]

Tom Holt never fails to write incredible books, and this book is no exception. Overtime follows the increasingly ridiculous story of a man who learns time is flexible and, with the right knowledge, one can jump from WWII to the time of the crusades, to any other point in time whenever one wants. Chaos ensues, with inland revenue, bouncy castles, the AntiChrist and a whole bunch of buffoonery. An absolute chuckle of a book, and in my opinion, a great chilled out book to take you away from the stress of the real world!

[Thevogon · Rating 3 out of 5]

As with the last Tom Holt I read, probably too recently, while there are some genuine flashes of humour along the way the real moment of genius is the initial setup. The plot is then left to ramble along in its wake, sometimes losing its way. The situation is left to bear the load, rather than the actual writing, and it failed to do that for lengthy stretches. Maybe a longer interval since the last one would have helped in my case.

[Doug · Rating 3 out of 5]

Hmm, where to stick this? There are no elves/orcs/dwarves, so must be sci-fi.
I've read several of Tom Holts books and for me they fall into the category of 'sly british humored sci fi of the sort with current day people experiencing out of the ordinary things (i.e. time travel, etc.)'. It's fun to just follow the plot from ordinary to odd and back again (several times!)

[Marie (UK) · Rating 2 out of 5]

A farcical time travelling tale where a WWI pilot meets a servant from the core to Richard the Lionheart. Richard, missing after the crusades is locked in a castle in unknown time and space. Easy enough to read but thorougoughly nonsensical

[Dave · Rating 3 out of 5]

I wasn't as keen on this as his later books. The storyline didn't really interest me and Guy seems a bit redundant. I feel like the story would work just as well without him. One for the Holt completists only.

[Dave · Rating 3 out of 5]

A strong 3 out of 5.
I'm a pretty severe scorer.
Thought this book delivered a good story.

[David · Rating 1 out of 5]

I couldn’t finish the book. I really tried, but I just can't.

[Annette · Rating 2 out of 5]

Picked this up a week or two ago in a two-book omnibus that also contains "Grailblazers". However, I prefer to review such items individually.
Honestly, I had trouble staying interested. As another reviewer mentioned, it probably doesn't help that I was (am?) unfamiliar with the "Blondel" myth - in fact, I didn't know until I read said review that the character wasn't made out of whole cloth by the author.
Overtime had its moments, but rarely was there anything laugh-out-loud funny, and - perhaps unsurprisingly for a time travel story - it was frequently convoluted and difficult to follow, but without any significant payoff. After a couple of chapters I just kind of gave up and disconnected from trying to figure it out and plowed ahead, but never got to the "good stuff." On top of that, there were strong elements of Dr. Who. Again, possibly inevitable for a time-travel book, but it did feel pretty derivative.
I eventually put my finger on the basic problem with the story: there were no characters to like - or even to hate. Blondel was the best there was, but there was no real opportunity to connect emotionally with him. Guy, boring and whiny. His role is much like Arthur Dent in HHGTG, but without a decent Ford to play off of. Isoud, doubly so. The financial planning brothers were in many ways the funniest and perhaps least irritating of the lot. And the bad guys... there was just nothing to get excited about. The only thing that kept me reading was the humor - Holt can be rationally compared to Douglas Adams, Monty Python, and even Terry Pratchett - but perhaps the reason his stuff can be so hard to find here (even Powell's City of Books has a very small selection) is that, though prolific, most of it simply isn't in the same league as the aforementioned.
Still, I am not writing off the author. I have certainly enjoyed others of his novels considerably more - for instance,
Barking and You Don't Have to Be Evil to Work Here, But it Helps.

[Chris Clovis · Rating 2 out of 5]

A forgettable novel that tries to be amusing but is really more confusing. There are some interesting characters but generally a disappointing read.

[Glen Engel-Cox · Rating 3 out of 5]

While not as humourous as some of his previous books, Tom Holt still delivers the fun. (Judicious editing will make that as good a blurb as any of Rex Reed's.) I think I missed out on a lot that was going on here because I can't read French and thus was unable to translate the many chansons included here. This was also Holt's first book to really utilize time travel; he had used the concept of long periods of time between characters in Who's Afraid of Beowulf and Flying Dutch, but this is the first time modern characters have moved backwards in time for him. The trick with humourous fantasy is that the fantasy must stick to certain rules for the humour to come across as funny rather than just another piece of fantastic. Unfortunately, by the wild nature of time travel, Holt got very close to stepping over the line here. In fact, my favorite Holt novels are the "Walled Orchard" duo, in which he meticulously draws realistic Ancient Greek culture (with some ambiguous insertions of the fantastic; by the way, he is an ancient history scholar) and then adds the humour (although it had a tendancy to be slightly black because of the realism).

There's some great bits here: the definition of Time & Overtime, and how they differ; the Anti-Pope; the Beaumont Street investment firm (the Crusades always provided the highest yield); a wonderfully done deus ex macchina; and how the world was made. But this seemed to be made of more bits than whole. Maybe that's the nature of time.

[Nathan Dehoff · Rating 3 out of 5]

This early Holt novel deals with some themes the author would develop more thoroughly in later works: time travel, the extension of historical legends into the modern day, and businesses that will do anything to make a buck. Despite some funny concepts, like an investment firm with access to time travel that invests in the Crusades, it's not as good as later stories that use these same ideas. It's based partially on the story of Blondel, the wandering bard who sought King Richard I by singing the first part of a song only the two of them knew at every castle he found. As the story begins, he's been fruitlessly searching at castles across time and space, and also performing gigs in different eras. He teams up with a World War II pilot named Guy Goodlet, and the two of them end up having to battle the Antichrist, who shares a body with a future pope. It's rather confusing, and I didn't find the characters all that interesting. The story basically admits that the love subplot between Guy and Blondel's sister comes out of nowhere; I'm not entirely sure why Holt includes a rapidly-developing romance in pretty much every book. It's worth a read, but I don't recommend it as a starting point for Holt.

[Tim Schneider · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is probably the weakest of Holt's books that I've read thus far. It probably didn't help that I'm not at all familiar with the Blondel myth. Unfortunately this didn't make me want to rush out and learn more. A marginal time-travel plot and not terribly interesting characters didn't add up to a scintillating read. The saving grace was Holt's sense of humor which made it worth plowing through.

[Herman Nijland · Rating 3 out of 5]

Nice read, but after a promising beginning the plot peters out a in the end. My problem with more of Holts novels - a very promising basic idea, but tying the finishing knot seems to be an issue with Holt.

[Kate · Rating 3 out of 5]

Similar to, though not quite so good as, Terry Pratchett and, to a lesser extent, Douglas Adams.

[Ramya · Rating 3 out of 5]

wonderful read! much more than a regular tom holt wizardry of placing familiar characters in new settings!

[Jean · Rating 3 out of 5]

amusing but a bit formulaic and longer than it needs to be