CV Rick's Reviews

Time Travel Screwball Comedy

Ned Henry goes to Victorian England and falls into a madcap adventure to save the world.  I think that sums it up. 

Connie Willis is such a good writer that she can take a story and remake it into a completely different tale. That's what she did with this book. Following the organization of 2057 England time-traveling historians she built in The Doomsday Book, but not all stories are as heavy-hearted, tragic, as that previous tome.

In this one, a restoration project for Coventry Cathedral requires the recovery of a certain item, The Bishop's Bird Stump and a righting of the mistakes of an earlier historian sent unsuccessfully on the case. Ned knows nothing of Victorian England, however. She takes a spin from Jerome K Jerome's classic travelogue of the Thames, Three Men in a Boat (subtitled "to say nothing of the dog") and turns it into a wonderfully insincere adventure with a very sincere core meaning. By the end, I was shaking my head and saying to myself, "how'd she do that?"

A master storyteller she is, a master at narrative voice she is, and a master at twisting the emotional texture of a reader's experience she definitely is. Well done, highly recommended.

- CV Rick  

Science Fiction meets Speculative Fiction

Why do we read Speculative Fiction? The reason I read it is for great stories about wild possibilities - you know, the excitement of a really good "what if?" Doomsday Book has that punch, that "What if?" Here it is . . . what if a time traveler accidentally goes back to England during the time of the Plague and people in both the past and the present start getting sick and dying? This opens a whole realm of possibilities and problems of course. Did the plague actually come from the future and infect the past making it an enormous paradox? Did the plague from the past leap to the future and start its run anew?

Connie Willis has a gift for characters and her main ones are wonderfully well-defined, alive in their actions and sympathetic for the reader. Kivrin, the historian who is thrust into the past and into the path of the plague, is a fantastic narrator who discovers horror and heroism in a small village where the fate of everyone rests in the hands of a humble priest.

Why do we read Historical Fiction? The reason I read it is to experience the past through the telling of a great story - you know, the excitement of really being "there." Again, this book satisfies that criteria through page after page of brilliant prose. Connie Willis did her research and more than any other account I've read, she made me experience the true devastation of the disease that nearly wiped out the population of Europe. It may have only killed around a half (wikipedia says 75 million) of the residents of the continent, but that's just because it didn't hit every town and every province. Where it did hit, survivors were rare.

I don't cry, but tears came to my eyes several times while reading this book.  Hats off to Ms. Willis for writing so powerfully.

There have been a lot of complaints about the pacing and if you've read some of my reviews you'll know that I'm a stickler for action moving the plot along. But action isn't just running or fighting, sometimes action is in discovery and dialogue . . . and that's the action of Doomsday Book. The reader has to care about Kivrin. In fact the reader has to become Kivrin, and experience the Plague before the emotional impact can be felt, and that's what the action of this plot does for us . . . we experience life in the past, then illness, then death, and we never know if we're going to be the next to die.

There have also been complaints that the storyline of the future isn't as strong as the story in the past. Well, to be frank, it's not supposed to be. The story is about Kivrin and we need to know what's going on in the future because it has the potential to impact Kivrin in many ways. For example, the simple question of whether she can ever be retrieved is paramount to the story. We, as readers, become more emotionally involved with Kivrin based on that knowledge and this is Kivrin's story after all. We also have to know the course of disease in the future for the same reason. Sure the future gets short-shrift on the character development, but how big of a book do you want? Connie Willis didn't write a multi-volume epic, she wrote a powerful and complete story. And she did it well.

- CV Rick