As a reader, I’ve notice that the world is full of books I just read. I experience them. I enjoy them. And then I let them go. They don’t really make a big impact on my life, on my mood, my emotional state. Connie Willis is not writing those books.
Connie Willis is writing stay up all night, I’m not leaving the house until I know what happens books. She’s writing drive me crazy, break my heart, leave me desperately needing to talk about what just happened books. Fair warning, I would not recommend her during a time where you have, you know, other things going on in your life.
I read Connie Willis’ Doomsday Book back in high school. I remember that I loved it. The time-travel-to-the-medieval-period subgenre is near and dear to me, and The Doomsday Book is waaay better than Timeline. Somehow I missed the memo that Connie Willis followed that book up with three more time travel books: To Say Nothing of the Dog, Blackout, and All Clear. I’m sure at some point I’ll go back and get to To Say Nothing of the Dog, but recently I jumped straight into the epic that is Blackout/All Clear.
Before I start recounting my wild emotional journey, I’ll just note that for all functional purposes Blackout and All Clear are basically one book. They’re both too long to get published as one giant tome, but it’s one continuous story. I really don’t think anyone has ever successfully read the first book and not immediately picked up the second. And if so, they’re wrong.
Blackout/All Clear takes place in Oxford in 2060 and London during the Blitz. It follows three young time travelers who get unexpectedly stuck in World War Two. Getting stuck in London during the Blitz is, you know, problematic, so the story follows their attempts to get out, not die, make a living in a foreign time, and the parallel rescue mission. I think I experienced close to every possible emotion while reading this book, but it started with frustration.
The book starts in 2060, but it’s a 2060 that Ms. Willis started writing in 1992, so somehow it’s missing things like email or cell phones. So the book starts with a tedious amount of characters dashing back and forth through Oxford trying to catch people but just missing them. And it was all I could do not to throw the book across the room and shout “just fucking text them!” Take a deep breath with me and let it go, because everything in this book takes a long time. The sooner you accept it, the less time you’ll spend asking your friends when this damn book gets better. Trust me. It does.
Blackout can feel like it starts slow. There’s a huge amount of detail as each of our characters tries to find and accomplish their original mission. Polly is observing shelter life during the beginning of the Blitz. Mike is studying the evacuation of Dunkirk. Eileen is studying the evacuation of children to the countryside. I’m pretty sure 50% of the reason Connie Willis wrote this book was as a celebration of the amazing heroism of everyday English civilians during World War Two. Each of our heroes finds an amazing variety of strong, funny, flawed but lovely humans all doing their best to make the best of one of the worst parts of modern history.
And as much as I found the slow parts of the book frustrating, they were ultimately rewarding, because they put the reader emotionally in the shoes of someone trying to make the best of living with the bombings and the rationing and the fear that any minute now England could be invaded. It’s sort of like method acting. It’s method reading. And soon enough, each of our three heroes realize they’re stuck. When they finally join forces to survive and find a way home, the book really starts cooking. But the more I think about it, the more the buildup of frustration and impatience seems like a tool. Because the book already had me feeling something. So when all of a sudden when the book goes from “if you explain this time paradox to my one more time I’m going to punch you” to “HOLY SHIT EVERYTHIG IS ON FIRE,” the emotional whiplash sets you up for gripping, page turning, pulse racing reading like I’ve rarely experienced before.
Restated: This book has so much damn setup, that when you finally get to the payoff, it’s SO SATISFYING. (Spoilers ahead. Stop here if you haven’t read it) There’s a lot of things I knew were going to happen in this book. Alf and Binnie becoming integral to the plot, the possibility of unraveling the space time continuum, Collin finally finding Polly, all of it was predictable a hundred pages away. But somehow when they finally happen, instead of being annoyed, I wanted to jump for joy. I was so happy to find Binnie as the linchpin that holds the whole thing together because I have 700 pages invested in her survival and success. There were enough twists and turns I didn’t see coming to keep me interested and enough that I did see coming to feel like I got my rewards for sticking with the books.
And that ending. After reading it, I got into a long debate about whether it was tragic or emotionally satisfying that Eileen stayed behind. I loved it because it felt like the only option for her. She had Alf and Binnie and the vicar and a whole life ahead of her in the 1940s. And after two books of being patronized and protected, she got to ultimately save everyone. But she also abandoned the world she had known and grown up in for a completely foreign time. It was complicated and bittersweet and worth debating, and those are some of the highest praises I can give.
Nerd Academy 