Doomsday Book (SF) - Connie Willis ***

Having enjoyed Connie Willis's collection of award winning stories, Time is the Fire, I thought I'd follow up with her 1992 novel (winner of both SF's major book awards). To be honest, I struggled with this one.

In my review of Time is the Fire I suggested a couple of the stories were unnecessary long - this doubly applies to Doomsday Book. It is so slow, there's a feeling it's going to come to an absolute stop any time soon. I know the topic is time travel, but this made time go very slowly indeed. Just one example - a character bursts into a pub with an important piece of information and collapses. We then get what feels like 100 pages of him not quite telling us what he wanted to say. In his excellent introduction (the best bit of the book) Adam Roberts says 'Doomsday Book is a long novel, and it starts slowly; but its length is not egregious.' Well, no, I suppose it's not - but it is distinctly painful.

I ought to mention that the underlying concept is excellent. The book is set in the 2050s where there are political shenanigans between different parts of the Oxford University history department. The goodies are 20th century historians, who are thoughtful and careful - contrasted with the careless medieval historians who send the heroine Kivrin back to the fourteenth century unprepared for what she will meet. The book then alternates between the 2050s and Kivrin's experiences.

Particular resonant now are the 'present day' scenes, which feature Oxford locking down after a virus outbreak - a process that has become standard since an earlier pandemic. Meanwhile, as Roberts points out, while Willis doesn't play with the mind-bending aspects of time travel (and gets a fair number of historical details wrong), she nonetheless does an excellent job of exposing us with Kivrin to the less than jolly aspects of life and death in the thirteenth century. It's just done at a glacial pace.

One strange aspect is Willis's portrayal of 2050s Oxford. Bizarrely, someone is bought a Christmas present of a 'muffler' - a word that was already antiquated when the novel came out. In fact, Willis's 2050s social setting feels far more like the 1930s than 60 years ahead of when it was written. Almost everyone is very formal and stiff. The dialogue and general social attitudes could come straight out of, say, C. S. Lewis's 1938 Out of the Silent Planet. This just feels very odd.

All in all, while the concept was great, I couldn't get on with the way this book was written - it was a disappointment.

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Review by Brian Clegg - See all Brian's online articles or subscribe to a weekly email free here

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