Book Review: Blackout/All Clear

Connie Willis
2010
Awards: Nebula, Hugo, Locus
Rating: ★ ★ ★ – –

SPOILER ALERT

Blackout/All Clear contains many of the elements that make Willis’ other books great: humor, tragedy, clear writing, impeccable historical research, and funny, telling, sweet, personal details. The problem is that it is just too long.

The story is a duology, a set of two books, each over 600 pages long in its original hardcover edition. While it has many wonderful moments, it generally reads more like a meandering personal history of World War II Britain rather than a tightly-plotted SF novel in which key historical details serve the story by adding color and realism.

Like several of Willis’ best books, Blackout/All Clear begins at Oxford University in the 2060s, where students and historians regularly travel back in time for hands-on research projects.

There are only two restrictions on Oxford’s time-travel technology. One is that a historian can’t go back to a “divergence point”—a time and place where they could significantly alter history. They can’t, for example, grab a loaded gun and arrange to be dropped into a room alone with Hitler in 1935. The calculations won’t work and the “drop” won’t open to get them there. And the other is that they cannot overlap themselves in time. So if they go to 1805 on one assignment, and then on the next assignment they go to 1804, they had better make sure to back by the end of the year or the continuum will find a way to get them killed. This is called having a “deadline.”

The main characters of Blackout/All Clear are three Oxford students who all travel back to do research in 1940 England. Polly goes to work as a shop girl in a London department store during the Blitz. Eileen goes to work as a nanny for children who have been evacuated to the countryside. And Michael goes to Dover, posing as an American reporter observing the British soldiers and their fisherman rescuers returning from the battle of Dunkirk.

All three students, in spite of themselves, manage to get into situations where they alter history. Polly prevents one of her co-workers from being at home when her house is destroyed by a bomb. Eileen prevents two evacuees from being sent to America on a ship that is sunk by a U-Boat. Michael rescues a soldier at Dunkirk who then in turn saves the lives of over five hundred other soldiers.

The first sign that they might have seriously messed something up is that their drops—the portals that open periodically to take them back to their own time—don’t open when they are scheduled to. Then the back-up drop at Oxford won’t open either. Then they try in vain to find other historians who were in World War II on earlier assignments, so they can borrow their drops. They wait for an emergency retrieval team to come rescue them, but months go by and no one arrives. And they start to realize that they may have irrevocably changed history so that their present no longer exists.

And the tension ratchets up higher when Polly reveals that she has a deadline: she already did an assignment at the V-E Day celebrations in Trafalgar Square. Which means that if she doesn’t find her way back to her present, the continuum will get her killed before 1945.

I love Connie Willis. I hate to say anything negative about her writing at all. But there were several things about Blackout/All Clear that came to bother me.

The sheer quantity of side plots and diversions made it sometimes seem like the purpose of the book was to include as many historical details about as many aspects of wartime England as possible, rather than to have selected details enrich the central plot. Many elements—including, unfortunately, a trip to Bletchley Park, my favorite World War II location—felt like they were added mainly to provide historical detail for the sake of historical detail, rather than to further the story. As informative as this was, it was distracting and slowed the pace.

One of the trademarks of Willis’ style is the breathless use of constant, timely mishaps and interruptions—usually by children or well-meaning dowagers—to prevent the main characters from receiving key information, getting where they are supposed to be, or meeting someone they need to meet. (They are, similarly, often saved in the nick of time from accident, death, or exposure as time-travelers by phone calls, door knocks, or air raid sirens.) This can be quite effective and funny (or tragic, or ironic) on a smaller scale, as in To Say Nothing of the Dog. But about three-quarters of the way through Blackout, the convoluted near-misses and the frustrating passivity of the characters in the face of them started to wear thin. It began to seem like gimmick or a style she couldn’t escape from.

And finally, throughout the entire story, Polly keeps getting sucked into doing performances of various kinds, from the pantomimes and Shakespeare plays put on by her air-raid-shelter-mates to the girlie revue she gets assigned to by the war employment office. Having no interest in performing myself, I didn’t relate to them in the first place, and the way they led to so much inconvenience and pressure and distraction made them quickly become tiresome.

On the plus side, I will say that Willis’ historical research, as always, is excellent. In spite of the problem I had with the quantity of detail, at key moments in the book it really does make history come alive. For example:

• Michael accidentally gets stuck on a boat that goes to rescue the British soldiers at Dunkirk. Her description of his experience is riveting. I felt like I could see it in full color, from the city burning on the shore and the smoke in the sky, to the men pouring onto the boats and threatening to swamp them, to the debris (including people) in the water. And it was told realistically from the point of view of the rescuers, non-combatants who waded bravely into a situation not knowing what would happen or how dangerous it was until they got there.

St. Paul's Survives, Herbert Mason, Dec. 1940




• Polly spends a considerable amount of time sleeping and otherwise passing the time during air raids in London Underground stations, which were used as public shelters during the Blitz. I learned what it felt like to sleep on the cold, hard floor of the tube stations, how they were often noisy, bright, smelly, and sometimes so crowded it was hard to find a space. I learned that there was a whole infrastructure built up for the shelters, including security guards, first aid stations, and canteens where people could buy food.

• The V-E day celebrations—which we see at various points during the book—did mean a lot more to me at the end, after watching the characters go through so much detailed deprivation and fear. As Willis says, when you’ve lived through years of electricity shortages and blackouts, it is unbelievably glorious to see all the lights turned on.

Willis also always seems to have a huge amount of empathy for people in general and tremendous skill at putting herself into the minds of others. She does an excellent job in this book, as in everything she writes, of illustrating how real people would act under unique and incredibly stressful conditions. Her heroes are normal, everyday people, who can be afraid, misguided, panicky, and irritable. And she makes you realize that courage can come from anyone. Even the most flap-headed or confused people can be heroic, even when they don’t intend to be. In fact, since real people have no knowledge of the future and imperfect knowledge of the present, it makes it even more amazing when they do something brave or foresighted.

I also very much like the attitude towards life which fills her stories. She makes me feel very settled and comfortable with the knowledge that we live in a chaotic system. No one single thing ever determines the course of history (or, in the case of Bellwether, the course of fads). History is pushed and nudged in one direction or another by millions of little actions by millions of people. We’ll never be able to identify any one thing that held the key to Allied victory in World War II; it was millions of incidents, all over the world, on both sides, including some that were major and many that seem tiny and meaningless even now.

I think if this had been one 600-page book, consisting of mostly the first half of the first book and the second half of the second book, it would have been fantastic. But, as it is, it isn’t as focused as Firewatch; it isn’t as tragically wrenching as Doomsday Book; it isn’t as sweet as Bellwether; and it isn’t as funny as To Say Nothing of the Dog. If you’ve never read anything by Connie Willis, try those first.