Connie Willis
1992
Awards: Nebula, Hugo, Locus
Rating: ★ ★ ★ ★ ★
SPOILER ALERT
There are many books I have enjoyed a lot. There are a few books that
rise into a special category where I am completely sucked into the world
of the book; where while I’m taking a break from reading it, at work or
whatever, I’m still thinking about the characters and what just
happened and what will happen next; and where I read more and more
slowly because I don’t want it to end. The Lord of the Rings trilogy was like that for me, and Kim Stanley Robinson’s Red Mars, and Jon Krakauer’s Into Thin Air. Doomsday Book was one of these too. I just loved this book.
This book has some of the same characters as Willis’s To Say Nothing of the Dog.
It is also a time-travel story set in England and involves some of the
same Oxford historians, but takes place several years later.
Kivrin, a graduate student of medieval history at Oxford, goes back in
time to the 14th century to do research. Unfortunately, as part of her
preparation for the trip, Kivrin helped out an archaeologist digging up
one of the medieval tombs near Oxford and caught a 14th-century flu from
the buried remains. By the time she arrives in the 14th century, she is
delirious with fever. She is taken in by the family of the local lord
and they nurse her back to health; she grows attached to them and
becomes a governess to their two children.
Kivrin was supposed to be sent back to the 1320s, before the bubonic
plague got to England. But there was an unusually large amount of time
slippage on the drop and she ended up arriving the year the plague
arrived. At first everything goes okay but then, after the appearance of
some out-of-town visitors, everyone around her starts dying of the
plague.
Meanwhile, before Kivrin had gone back in time, she had already given
the flu to several people in current-day Oxford. There is no cure for
the flu in the present so the government shuts down all university
operations and quarantines the town and Kivrin’s advisor is unable to
get to the time lab and rescue Kivrin from the past.
Kivrin’s advisor’s struggles to get to the lab to find her and the
small-time bureaucracies he has to deal with are funny in the same way
the situations in To Say Nothing of the Dog
were. And, at the same time, the plague striking Kivrin’s 14th-century
family is horrific. The book was an expert combination of frustratingly
funny situations and genuinely moving loss and sadness.
It was the small things about Kivrin’s
experiences in the past that made them believable (and made the book
particularly great). Her clothing is too bright and too finely woven and
her fingernails and teeth are in far too good shape for the Middle
Ages. The Old English dialect she had studied turned out to be wrong for
the town she ended up in so the first person she is able to communicate
with is the town priest, who understands her spoken Latin. The ringing
of local church bells is, at first, a way of marking time during the day
but gradually becomes a way to communicate how the plague is decimating
the surrounding towns.
This review originally appeared on Cheeze Blog.
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