Post by wordy on Oct 2, 2011 15:30:26 GMT 10
Giantkiller's Bookshelf: Blackout/All-Clear, by Connie Willis
by Lisafer
Have you ever seen a movie because it won the Golden Globe and the Oscar for best film? Well, this book is that movie’s equivalent. Connie Willis is one of the best science-fiction writers out there, yet her name isn’t as recognized as Lois McMaster Bujold or Tanya Huff. However, she’s one of the most critically acclaimed. She’s won eleven Hugo Awards and seven Nebula Awards throughout her career, and the most recent (for both) was for the two-volume novel, Blackout and All-Clear. (Note that it’s not a book and its sequel – it’s one story broken into two parts, published in February and October of 2010.)
The setting is 2060, when history students at Oxford study their craft by actually traveling through time. It’s not necessary but doesn’t hurt to know that there have been previous books and short stories by Willis involving this concept; most importantly, most of these stories involve “slippage” – the fact that when historians go through the net, they often land at the improper time. Usually it’s off by a few minutes or hours. Sometimes it’s off by days. Sometimes the net doesn’t open at all, and historians are stuck in the lab. Or in the time they’re studying.
Merope, Polly and Michael are all studying World War II. Merope is staying in a countryside manor with children who were evacuated from London (those she’s dying to witness V-E Day at Trafalgar); Michael is researching everyday heroes, and is heading toward the evacuation at Dunkirk. And Polly wants to be shop-girl on Oxford street, studying how the contemporaries handled the blackout and the German air raids. But things fall apart – Michael lands miles away from Dunkirk, and then accidentally finds himself taking part in the evacuation (which is against the laws of time travel as they know it). The net won’t open for Merope, so she’s stuck in the English countryside until she remembers that her friend Polly works in one of the London shops. Polly, meanwhile, is also stuck – and since it’s past the period she was prepared to study, she doesn’t know where and when the bombs will drop.
There are all sorts of problems and complications – like the fact that some of these historians have made drops before, and they don’t know if a person can be two places at one. They also don’t know if all the things they are doing are changing the future and making time-travel potentially impossible. All they know is that they are stuck in London during the Blitz, and now they’re just like the contemporaries: trying to live life and never knowing when a V-1 rocket might kill them. They’re waiting for rescue, because they know their professor, James Dunworthy, won’t let them die in the past. But what happens when Professor Dunworthy travels back to retrieve them and also finds himself disoriented and stuck?
It’s an exciting tale, and Willis’s vivid writing will make you feel like you’re there and that life is perilous. The characterization is full and sharp from the smallest character to those we spend hundreds of pages with. The same is seen in the setting as well, as Blitz WWII is brought completely to life: its sights and sounds and smells, its terrors and absurdities and mundanities. And as with the characterization, this attention to detail and richness of presentation is layered with equal love on the "big" events such as the V2 attacks to even the tiniest moments: a new dress unpacked, a dog in a street, a scrawled phrase on a wall.
In the words of Connie Willis herself, “What are Blackout and All Clear about? They’re about Dunkirk and ration books and D-Day and V-1 rockets, about tube shelters and Bletchley Park and gas masks and stirrup pumps and Christmas pantomimes and cows and crossword puzzles and the deception campaign. And mostly the book’s about all the people who "did their bit" to save the world from Hitler—Shakespearean actors and ambulance drivers and vicars and landladies and nurses and WRENs and RAF pilots and Winston Churchill and General Patton and Agatha Christie—heroes all.”