Blackout, by Connie Willis
Author: Connie Willis
Genre: Science fiction
Pages: 491
Rating: 3.5 out of 5 stars
It’s taken me a long time to work through the mixed feelings I have for this book. I loved parts of it, many parts of it, actually, but I also have a lot to complain about, and complaining is so easy to do that I don’t want it to take over the whole review. So, I’m dividing the review into sections: The Good, The Bad, and -- instead of The Ugly -- The Confusing.
Summary ganked from Goodreads: Oxford in 2060 is a chaotic place. Scores of time-traveling historians are being sent into the past, to destinations including the American Civil War and the attack on the World Trade Center. Michael Davies is prepping to go to Pearl Harbor. Merope Ward is coping with a bunch of bratty 1940 evacuees and trying to talk her thesis adviser, Mr. Dunworthy, into letting her go to VE Day. Polly Churchill’s next assignment will be as a shopgirl in the middle of London’s Blitz. And seventeen-year-old Colin Templer, who has a major crush on Polly, is determined to go to the Crusades so that he can “catch up” to her in age.
But now the time-travel lab is suddenly canceling assignments for no apparent reason and switching around everyone’s schedules. And when Michael, Merope, and Polly finally get to World War II, things just get worse. For there they face air raids, blackouts, unexploded bombs, dive-bombing Stukas, rationing, shrapnel, V-1s, and two of the most incorrigible children in all of history-to say nothing of a growing feeling that not only their assignments but the war and history itself are spiraling out of control. Because suddenly the once-reliable mechanisms of time travel are showing significant glitches, and our heroes are beginning to question their most firmly held belief: that no historian can possibly change the past.
The Good
First, I just love Willis’ writing, especially her characters. She does the extremely limited third person POV better than anyone - I always feel immersed in whichever character viewpoint she’s writing from, because we get so close to their thoughts, even when crazy things are happening and they become totally unreliable (like when Ned Henry is a little out of his mind from time lag in To Say Nothing of the Dog; or when Polly is severely emotionally distraught over a bombing that she believes killed several contemps she’s gotten to know in Blackout). All of Willis’ characters are described with vivid precision and they all feel fully fleshed out, no matter how minor they are or how little page time they get. Though her books tend to have huge, complex plots, with a lot of stuff going on all the time, I still think her stories are mostly character-driven in the best way. And her characters are likable - some even lovable - because they are so normal and so real. Even as frustrated as I got with this book - and I did get frustrated - I still kept going back to it every chance I had because I needed to know what happens to the characters. I was emotionally invested in them and this provided some truly powerful moments (like the scene I mentioned with Polly above, or Mike, in the hospital, reflecting over what had happened to the others on the ship he unwittingly rode to Dunkirk).
Willis also excels at the farce. Though there is not as much of it in Blackout as in, say, To Say Nothing of the Dog, she still has some light-hearted, chaotic, wryly humorous moments interspersed in all the big human drama. Scenes involving Mike stuck in a little rural village waiting around for the one guy who has a car to show up, so that he doesn’t miss the entire event he traveled to the past to see, come to mind, especially when he meets an elderly crackpot ship’s captain who wants to go to Dunkirk in his extremely un-seaworthy boat.
Also, I complain a lot about the extent of period detail Willis uses in Blackout, but she does set the scene better than anyone I’ve read. Her portrayal of wartime England is astounding and seriously immersive, and she left nothing out: the dress and manner of the people in all walks of life, what shopping and department stores were like, what travel was like, what people ate and drank and did for fun, how people reacted to raids and air sirens night after night, what various kinds of bomb shelters existed, etc. She has a knack for including little details that make the experience feel realistic, like you’re living a “day in the life”. Of course, that was partly the problem, too, but I’ll get into that later.
Daily life is also well-developed in 2060, though we don’t spend much time there in this book and I don’t feel it is as believable (I’ll get into that later, too). What I loved most about the 2060-sections was seeing the administrative side of time travel. Sure, there are lots of historians in the field, doing research, but just think of the amount of people it takes to run everything smoothly. Just the scheduling of drops and pick-ups (return drops?) is a huge endeavor, but there are tons of other aspects to time travel that need regulating/managing: permissions, wardrobe, implants (for accents, languages, other information), training and studying and subliminals for whatever can’t be implanted (there’s a limit, of course). I enjoyed seeing a little bit into what all of those people have to do in order to get the historians safely to and from their time period, and oh, the chaos of bureaucracy.
Finally, I found the big questions, the looming issues, to be fascinating, and the kind of questions that are a necessary projection (or extrapolation?) of her other time travel novels. The way time travel was discovered, tested, and eventually regulated throughout her other stories has led to this point. Is time travel breaking down history? Are historians changing the past and causing history to fracture? If not, what’s wrong with the Net? If so, how do they fix everything they’ve messed up?
The Bad
I do love the characters as individuals. But each one goes through the same narrative arc: there’s slippage in their drops, so they arrive in the past at the wrong time and/or place; they have to figure out where and when they are from vague clues; they have to overcome numerous obstacles to get to where they are supposed to be; whenever they try to return to 2060, the Net doesn’t open, so they have no idea what’s going on; the historical information they rely on (such as when bombs drop on certain areas) prove to be inaccurate or spotty, putting them in danger. This is a pretty interesting narrative arc, of course, but with three to six characters doing it in alternating chapters, it starts to feel repetitive and like no one is getting anywhere.
A lot of the “conflict” in this book hinges on missed communications: historians run around like chickens with sacks tied over their heads, leaving scores of hand-written notes and word-of-mouth messages in their wake that the intended recipients get too late or not at all (no one has cell phones or voice mail, apparently, in the future, and forget about texting!). In the meantime, things change so drastically that the original messages are no longer relevant. It’s frustrating to have all of these characters running around just missing each other, but it at least makes sense when they’re all in various places of WW2 England and have to rely on antiquated modes of communication. There’s really no excuse for it when they’re all in 2060. I did read a review on Goodreads where someone quoted a passage of the book about how cell phones were eventually deemed too dangerous to use, but I find it hard to believe that society hadn’t come up with a substitute. Are all wireless signals dangerous? Also, I missed that little detail in my reading, so I think it could have been reinforced. Overall, I couldn’t believe they had some of the technology they had in 2060 (like implants that give different accents or upload reams of information) but no better ways of communicating.
When the characters weren’t running around trying to catch up to someone or something, they were sitting around waiting for someone to turn up or something to happen. In excruciating detail. I skimmed over a lot of extremely specific period detail because I wanted to get to the story (or maybe get on with the story). This is probably the reason that the cliffhanger didn’t bother me (I also knew before I started that the story would conclude in All Clear). It might have bothered me more if I’d felt the same sense of urgency as the characters did - while they were running around frantic, on the verge of panic nearly every second, I was skimming over it, waiting for something to happen myself.
The Confusing
There are at least two sections in which the historians are never named and what they are doing is never explained or given context. Coming as they do in the middle of a big book filled with what feels like hundreds of characters, all of whom must be kept track of, these sections threw me so far out of the story that I nearly gave up. I kept wondering, “Who is this? Am I supposed to know already? Was there mention of this person earlier in the book, in one of the 21st century chapters, and what he is doing? Did I miss it?” I went back and paged through some of those chapters, to no avail.
I think these nameless historians on their shadowy tasks were included for mystery’s sake. They may not even be important, just a blip on the radar, just there to show that other historians are out there doing things that somehow tie into the larger story of “is time travel breaking down, and is it irrevocably changing history?” Will they eventually tie in, make sense? No idea.
Also, a few characters get dropped by the time the main three historians (Mike, Polly, and Elaine/Merope) meet up, such as the lady ambulance driver researching V 1 bombs (can’t remember her name), and Colin, the kid in love with Polly. These characters start out being interspersed with Mike, Polly, and Elaine/Merope, but suddenly disappear in the middle of the book. It’s tough enough to keep track of all the different narrative threads, but if I spend half a book following someone’s story, I want their story to continue to the end.
Reading this book is kind of like looking at a huge, beautifully woven tapestry with a magnifying glass. You can inspect the details, but until you step back and see the whole thing all at once, you really don’t know what the picture is. You have no sense of context. Willis zooms in on various scenes, only to pull back and shift view so far that you can’t process what you were just looking at. Plus, this is only half the story, with everything dependent on what happens in All Clear. On the one hand, this is an ingenious “puzzle” structure for an intelligent, thought-provoking novel. On the other hand, it can be damn frustrating, leading to some scenes and characters falling outside the structure because you don’t know what to do with them.
I do trust Willis, and I trust that it will all come together in a cool bit of literary wrangling and awesome showmanship. She’s too amazing of a writer -- and a historian, herself -- not to provide payoff for her readers. A lot of riding on All Clear, and I only hope that the solution to the puzzle is worth the wait.