09/02/17: Connie Willis – Doomsday Book (1992)

This was £1.99 from Barnardo's in Whetstone. The "SF Masterworks" series is usually reliable, so I tend to pick them up when I see them. The plot? Young historian Kivrin Engle is sent back in time as part of a university research project using the "net" time-travel technology of Oxford in the year 2054. This is sophisticated enough to prevent intervention in the past from changing the course of history – although quite how is never explained. Instead of "arriving" in 1320 as intended, Kivrin is accidentally dropped in 1348 during the Black Death pandemic. (This is given away on the back cover, but she doesn't learn it for herself until p.390.) Meanwhile, the Oxford research team is hit by a deadly virus and the two seem to be ominously linked...

While it's based on an intriguing premise, I found there was way too much rushing about, fussing around and breathless interchanges between too many characters – a lot of baggage for a fairly simple plot. It could have been tightened up considerably. It can be tedious and frustrating reading about characters' incomprehension of things you, the reader, have already grasped or had explained to you. These passages go on for way too long. A lot depends on certain characters being unable to ask or answer certain questions. Some paragraphs could have been cut altogether: "Mary flicked the light on and went over to the tea trolley. She shook the electric kettle and disappeared into the WC with it. He sat down. Someone had taken away the tray of blood-testing equipment and moved the end table back to its proper place, but Mary's shopping bag was still sitting in the middle of the floor. He leaned forward and moved it over next to the chairs. Mary reappeared with the kettle. She bent and plugged it in." I was expecting the bag or the kettle to reveal some importance in the plot, but these are just needless details. Likewise, parts of the 1348 sequences, while interesting, read like a historical soap opera.

Most problematic is that 2054 doesn’t feel futuristic at all. Phones have live video, but are constantly engaged and failing. Oxford still has a Debenhams and Blackwells, and there are still newspapers and a struggling NHS. More importantly, in terms of the way people speak and think, there is little attempt to reflect the ways life has changed.

In these Brexit days, it’s interesting that the book has a side story about protests urging Britain to exit Europe, so the author predicted this correctly – albeit several decades after it actually happened.

Despite the above reservations, I trudged on and – surprisingly – slowly found myself becoming engrossed. You want Kivrin to make it home and you want the ill people to get well, so you keep reading. By the last 200 pages I was totally hooked. Is it science fiction? Just about (because of the time travel theme). Is it a "masterwork"? No.