# Blackout by Connie Willis



## Werthead (Jul 6, 2011)

Oxford, 2060. Thanks to the invention of time travel, historians are now  undertaking field trips into the distant (and not-so-distant past),  blending in with the 'contemps' to study history in motion. The laws of  time travel prevent history from being changed: major 'divergence  points' in history are unreachable and history will always  course-correct. At least, that was the theory. When a historian visiting  World War II Britain makes an unexpected side-trip to Dunkirk (one of  the divergence points), something does change, and he and two other  historians working in the same period find themselves unable to get  home. Increasingly worried that they may have altered the course of  history, they try to find one another and pool their resources...but in  the chaos of the Blitz, that's easier said than done.

_Blackout_  is the first half of an enormous single novel written by Connie Willis  over a period of about five years. The second half is published under  the title _All Clear_. The two books are set in the same 'future history' as Willis' _Doomsday Book_ and _To Say Nothing of the Dog_, though it is not necessary to have read those books to understand this one. _Blackout_ has been well-received, and is the favourite to win the Hugo Award for Best Novel this year.

Reading the book, it's hard to see why. _Blackout_ and _All Clear_  should have been a brilliant, compelling and tight 400-page or so page  single novel. At almost 1,300 pages (between the two volumes), it's  instead a massive, bloated and swollen book so packed with filler and  minutiae that it's hard to plough on through the novel. The author has  spent weeks and months researching the Second World War in extreme  detail and by God, every single last bit of that research is going in  the novel whether you like it or not.

Which of course is an  immediate problem when some of the research turns out to immediately be  wrong. The novel takes an astonishingly Anglo-centric view of the war.  The historians from Oxford fifty years from now constantly make  ludicrously inept statements along the lines that Hitler could have won  the war if he'd achieved his objectives in the Battle of the Bulge, or  that Dunkirk was one of the single most important moments in history. It  takes two-thirds of the novel before someone even grudgingly admits  that the Russians may have played some role in the defeat of Nazi  Germany. The WWII contemps taking this role would be fully  understandable (most of the book takes place during the Blitz, many  months before the USSR enters the war), but the supposedly educated and  expert futuristic historians making these claims is just bizarre.

Furthermore,  one of the conceits of the entire 'time-travelling historian' series is  that Oxford in 2060 is very much like Oxford in say 1955. The conceit  is, by now, tired and twee, and fortunately one of the benefits of the  structure of the novel is that we pretty quickly leave 21st Century  Oxford behind. After the historians 'change history' (or the point where  they think they did) we stop getting scenes set back in 2060, so we're  as much in the dark about what's happened as the characters are. This is  one of the book's better notions and does introduce some narrative  tension towards the end of the novel. However, Willis' research again  seems to have failed when a character discusses how it's illegal for a  17-year-old to have sex. Not in the UK, it isn't (the age of consent  here is 16). I suppose it's possible the law changes between now and  then, but the utter lack of expansion on the statement (whereas every  single other thing in the book is explained twenty times over) leads to  the conclusion that the author didn't bother with some rudimentary  fact-checking.

Once we get to World War II and the Blitz, things  pick up a lot. The Blitz has a romantic image in  the eyes of many  people, but the reality of dealing with the threat of death on a daily  basis was rather uglier than the popular myth shows, and Willis, to her  credit, engages with these themes and ideas straight away. For every  person showing the 'British bulldog' spirit and a stiff upper lip, there  are more who are so traumatised they flee the city altogether, or  suffer from severe stress-related issues. People had to develop  psychological defences to deal with the situation, focusing on routine  or distractions, and these ideas come across very well. The depiction of  life in war-torn Britain is refreshingly real and grim rather than the  more traditional and cliched view seen elsewhere.

Character-wise,  the book has problems. First of all, the POV system is a bit odd.  Several characters with POVs at the start of the novel - other  historians visiting 1944, later in the war when the V1s started landing -  abruptly vanish with no explanation a few chapters in, leaving their  stories hanging. Even if they are revisited in _All Clear_,  it'll still be many hundreds of pages since they last appeared (though  there's a potentially very clever way around that, one I'm hoping Willis  goes with in the follow-up). A bigger issue is that our three principal  POVs - Eileen, Polly and Michael - are all rather bland and lack  defining characteristics. When they eventually meet up, this gets worse  with Eileen and Polly becoming almost indistinguishable, and Michael  only being defined by a foot injury he sustains early in the novel in  Dunkirk. Oddly for a novel using the limited third-person perspective,  it's actually the secondary and supporting characters who really come  alive in the novel. The people who share Polly's bomb shelter and decide  to form an impromptu acting troupe are a highlight, as are the  ridiculously destructive children Eileen has to look after in a stately  manor.

The pacing can best be described as torturous. It's not  enough to be told that a character takes a ride in a train. We must be  told that they have difficulties getting a ticket, and once they get a  ticket there is then tension over whether the train is going to turn up  or be cancelled. When the train does arrive, we are told about the  character's difficulty in securing a seat and then their observations on  the countryside as it passes. When another character steps off the  train to talk to a station master and takes slightly too long, it's a  spellbinding moment of drama and tension in comparison. Characters also  have a habit of repeating the same thing to themselves fifty times over  per chapter, usually as they're doing something gripping like trying to  buy some stockings and musing on how soon Londoners will have to go  without. And people talk about the plot far more than they actually do  things to advance the plot.

The overall feeling of reading the  book is one of wading through treacle. Yet, there are moments that make  the pages upon pages of filler worth it: the more visceral and harrowing  account of the Blitz than we are used to in modern depictions, the  solid and intriguing cast of supporting characters, and the overall  mystery behind the closure of the time drops (the portals leading back  to 2060). For all that it seems to take forever to get there, Willis  does at least make the book's basic premise and story interesting,  interesting enough that you may be inspired to read on (or at least look  up the plot summary on Wikipedia, which may be less rewarding but also  considerably less frustrating).

_Blackout _(***)  is a book with enormous problems that almost sink it completely, but  the author battles back into the 'worthwhile' category with impressive  period research and some genuinely interesting ideas. But for many  readers, the bland lead characters, tweeness of the futuristic setting  and immense amounts of filler may prove too much of an obstacle. The  novel is available now in the UK and USA.


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## cile1977 (Aug 23, 2011)

I just do not understand why they do not have mobile phones in year of 2060? I almost put down the book when they started to run about trying to find each other in campus, leaving messages on papers that cannot be read... WTF?
I did'n finish book yet - is there any explanation of this? Is future in the book in some other multiverse where electromagnetic communication is not possible? Are personal communication devices forbidden in Oxford? Is book written in 1950's?


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