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Title: Doomsday Book
Author: Connie Willis
Genre: Time-traveling SF
Thingummies: 4.5
Synopsis: A historian may be stranded in the Middle Ages when a disaster strikes a future Oxford.
Thoughts: There are certain set sub-genres for the “fish out of water” scenario in speculative fiction. There’s the worldwalker who finds themselves displaced from modern day to a fantasy land, the stranded colonist, the chosen one who discovers a hidden world inside our own. Each has a set of tropes which can be more or less annoying. In that sense, this book reminded me very much of others in the sub-genre, from Michael Crichton’s Timeline to Tim Powers’ The Anubis Gates. There’s the hurried preparation (it’s always hurried), the dubious motives of the people running the experiment (so you can worry whether the traveler will be retrieved), the careful plans for recording and rendezvous that can’t possibly go wrong and always do, the botched first encounter with the locals. At least, when going into the past, you’re less likely to have the tediously humorous montage of the traveler completely misunderstanding basic concepts that are stock images for characters from the past visiting the present or future.
There’s a certain pleasure in going through the tropes, however, and seeing how different authors approach them. Willis manages to make the tropes fresh by subverting some, ignoring others, and writing her way around the rest through sheer talent. (My favorite example, with a very minor spoiler, is that the historian, Kivrin, is genre-savvy enough to be terrified she’ll be burned as a witch. Despite her leaping at shadows, the possibility never really occurs to the very down-to-earth people she encounters, who are far too busy dealing with their own crises to worry whether she’s got paranormal powers or not.)
Kivrin, by the way, really annoyed me at the beginning of the book. I much preferred what rightfully probably should have been the B plot of Professor Dunworthy’s attempts to retrieve her from future-Oxford. I hated her attitude, I hated her hair, I hated her name. Fortunately, she manages to lose the first two relatively quickly, and the third becomes somewhat justified and tied in to the story.
The twin plots of disasters striking in future and ancient England are twined together impressively well. It’s a deeply moving, somewhat tragic about how people rise to an occasion or fail to, and how little we have actually changed.
Willis is one of the best masters of establishing tension I’ve read. Her prose pulls you along, almost faster than you want to go, as you desperately want to know what happens next. It’s not the plotting itself—I’ve read other works that had better cliffhangers and equally suspenseful events. It’s something about the quality of her prose, that drags you down like a whirlpool and just won’t let you go.
It’s something I noticed in the other book of hers I’ve read (Passage). There are some strong stylistic quirks the books share, not all of which I’m crazy about. She’s very fond of leaving her characters in hallucinations for pages at a time, so you really aren’t sure what actually happened. (She’s quite good at writing that strange dream logic of the feverish and it’s always plot appropriate. But if I read another book of hers and it also contains one of these passages, I’m going to cry foul.) She also tends to have very strong one-note minor characters. In Passage, it was the pop paranormalist, the woman who kept elaborating on her near death experience to add characters, and the WWII vet fabulist. Here, it’s the officious and foolhardy bureaucrat, the over solicitous mother, and the womanizing student. They pop up over and over, repeat nearly the same exchange each time, and never change in the slightest. (For example, the mother appears dozens of times. Every single thing she ever says is either a Bible reading or a comment on how the college is not taking proper care of her son who will catch his death from cold.) They’re running jokes that quickly wear thin. Given how rounded Kivrin is, it’s not that Willis doesn’t know how to write complex characters. They’re crutches she doesn’t need.
My other complaint is the recurring device of Kivrin’s journal entries. Since we’re getting both close third person narration and also the first person narration in the diary, we’re frequently seeing the same events repeatedly. But there’s no actual additional information, since it’s all still from Kivrin’s viewpoint. She has a bad experience and is scared; then she makes a journal entry saying that she’s scared. There’s no reason for them, and they’re occasionally clunky. I suspect it’s a device from an earlier draft Willis fell in love with, but the book would be stronger without them.
Complaints aside, this is a beautiful book. It’s well worth reading, and quite deserves the awards that were heaped upon it. But expect to be at least a little devastated—this is not a happy story.
Author: Connie Willis
Genre: Time-traveling SF
Thingummies: 4.5
Synopsis: A historian may be stranded in the Middle Ages when a disaster strikes a future Oxford.
Thoughts: There are certain set sub-genres for the “fish out of water” scenario in speculative fiction. There’s the worldwalker who finds themselves displaced from modern day to a fantasy land, the stranded colonist, the chosen one who discovers a hidden world inside our own. Each has a set of tropes which can be more or less annoying. In that sense, this book reminded me very much of others in the sub-genre, from Michael Crichton’s Timeline to Tim Powers’ The Anubis Gates. There’s the hurried preparation (it’s always hurried), the dubious motives of the people running the experiment (so you can worry whether the traveler will be retrieved), the careful plans for recording and rendezvous that can’t possibly go wrong and always do, the botched first encounter with the locals. At least, when going into the past, you’re less likely to have the tediously humorous montage of the traveler completely misunderstanding basic concepts that are stock images for characters from the past visiting the present or future.
There’s a certain pleasure in going through the tropes, however, and seeing how different authors approach them. Willis manages to make the tropes fresh by subverting some, ignoring others, and writing her way around the rest through sheer talent. (My favorite example, with a very minor spoiler, is that the historian, Kivrin, is genre-savvy enough to be terrified she’ll be burned as a witch. Despite her leaping at shadows, the possibility never really occurs to the very down-to-earth people she encounters, who are far too busy dealing with their own crises to worry whether she’s got paranormal powers or not.)
Kivrin, by the way, really annoyed me at the beginning of the book. I much preferred what rightfully probably should have been the B plot of Professor Dunworthy’s attempts to retrieve her from future-Oxford. I hated her attitude, I hated her hair, I hated her name. Fortunately, she manages to lose the first two relatively quickly, and the third becomes somewhat justified and tied in to the story.
The twin plots of disasters striking in future and ancient England are twined together impressively well. It’s a deeply moving, somewhat tragic about how people rise to an occasion or fail to, and how little we have actually changed.
Willis is one of the best masters of establishing tension I’ve read. Her prose pulls you along, almost faster than you want to go, as you desperately want to know what happens next. It’s not the plotting itself—I’ve read other works that had better cliffhangers and equally suspenseful events. It’s something about the quality of her prose, that drags you down like a whirlpool and just won’t let you go.
It’s something I noticed in the other book of hers I’ve read (Passage). There are some strong stylistic quirks the books share, not all of which I’m crazy about. She’s very fond of leaving her characters in hallucinations for pages at a time, so you really aren’t sure what actually happened. (She’s quite good at writing that strange dream logic of the feverish and it’s always plot appropriate. But if I read another book of hers and it also contains one of these passages, I’m going to cry foul.) She also tends to have very strong one-note minor characters. In Passage, it was the pop paranormalist, the woman who kept elaborating on her near death experience to add characters, and the WWII vet fabulist. Here, it’s the officious and foolhardy bureaucrat, the over solicitous mother, and the womanizing student. They pop up over and over, repeat nearly the same exchange each time, and never change in the slightest. (For example, the mother appears dozens of times. Every single thing she ever says is either a Bible reading or a comment on how the college is not taking proper care of her son who will catch his death from cold.) They’re running jokes that quickly wear thin. Given how rounded Kivrin is, it’s not that Willis doesn’t know how to write complex characters. They’re crutches she doesn’t need.
My other complaint is the recurring device of Kivrin’s journal entries. Since we’re getting both close third person narration and also the first person narration in the diary, we’re frequently seeing the same events repeatedly. But there’s no actual additional information, since it’s all still from Kivrin’s viewpoint. She has a bad experience and is scared; then she makes a journal entry saying that she’s scared. There’s no reason for them, and they’re occasionally clunky. I suspect it’s a device from an earlier draft Willis fell in love with, but the book would be stronger without them.
Complaints aside, this is a beautiful book. It’s well worth reading, and quite deserves the awards that were heaped upon it. But expect to be at least a little devastated—this is not a happy story.
no subject
Date: 2011-08-03 05:50 am (UTC)From: (Anonymous)For such a high rating, your review is somewhat mixed. Is that just because you liked the book plenty and you're listing the reasons it didn't get 5? Or do you have mixed feelings about the rating?
no subject
Date: 2011-08-03 11:59 am (UTC)From:I don't think I would have noticed the minor character problem if I hadn't just read another one of her books where it was even more of a problem and saw the pattern.