Doomsday Book

I had read a couple of books by Connie Willis a while back and I had a prejudice against her writing style that had me putting off the reading of Doomsday Book for quite a while. I had found Willis' style to be chatty and long winded and filled with extraneous minutiae to the point of being annoying. Doomsday Book has these characteristics too, though perhaps not to the same degree as Blackout/All Clear.

Spoiler Alert: Doomsday Book has two parallel stories, one of the Oxford historians in the near future, and one of the historian Kivrin who has been sent back in time alone to study the middle ages. Unbeknownst to Kivrin, she has been exposed to a nasty variety of influenza just before she is sent back in time. The flu creates an epidemic in Oxford and the technician and others on her team come down with it. Nobody knows that she has mistakenly been sent to the wrong year and faces the outbreak of the Black Plague, and the technician in his fever delirium is unable to tell them. People are dying of the flu and nobody is coherent. The avuncular Mr. Dunworthy is completely ineffectual in figuring out what's going on. The only one who exhibits any initiative and competency is a young boy name Colin, a child. Kivrin comes down with the flu after arriving in the middle ages and eventually recovers but can't find her way back to 'the drop' where she has a rendezvous to go back to modern day Oxford. About two thirds of the way through the book, Kivrin, seeing people coming down with the Black Death, realizes that she has arrived in 1348, instead of her target year of 1320. At about the same time, Mr. Dunworthy learns the same awful truth. In modern Oxford it takes Dunworthy days to arrange a rescue of Kivrin. In 1348, everybody around Kivrin gets the Plague and dies. By the time Dunworthy finally arrives to save her, she's the only one left alive.

Up to the two-thirds point the book moves slowly, in typical Willis style. Then suddenly it gets good, and even though it isn't fast paced it keeps our rapt attention. The historians at Oxford are incompetent to be running a time travel operation, annoyingly so. It is Kivrin's relationships with the medieval people that ground the book and ultimately make us care about it. Despite Willis writing style, Doomsday Book is worth reading. Clearly, many people enjoy her style, and if you are one of those, so much the better.