Doomsday Book by Connie Willis
445 pages
Published 1992
Read from October 1 to October 4
Rating: ★★★½ out of 5
I avoid reading plot synopses or even dust jackets, partly out of spoiler phobia, partly out of a preference to go in to each book fresh and not knowing what to expect. I saw Doomsday Book on somebody's list of the best sci-fi books, knew it had something to do with time travel to the Middle Ages, and entertained vague ideas of swashbucklin' and the hovels of the peasantry, maybe a cruel aristocrat and some romancin' thrown in for funsies. The details didn't matter. I needed some time travel and Middle Ages in my life, and I didn't care what it brought me. I wasn't expecting the flu to be a critical plot point.
The '90s were the decade of the pandemic thriller: Outbreak, Hot Zone, probably more stuff I'm too lazy to look up or remember right now. Not one but two epidemics crowd the pages of Doomsday. Researchers excavating a tomb release an ancient flu strain, which impairs the time travel technician enough to (spoilers) send Kivrin right into the teeth of the Black Death by mistake. While Kivrin lies ill and bedridden through the first third of the novel, we readers are treated to thrilling sequences set in the present -- chapter upon chapter of wryly observed academic bureaucracy, overbearing mothers, unhelpful nurses, and countless attempts to track people down on the phone. It's a bold narrative choice, to be sure. Willis' prose is the saving factor, demonstrating the quality that I believe is referred to as "compulsively readable." The phone sequences can hardly be called riveting, but Willis keeps them painless.
An interesting question, despite the death of the author and so on, is why a given writer decided to tell a particular story in a certain way. Here, I kept wondering: why mix the modern pandemic narrative with the medieval time travel adventure? There's symmetry there, a disease in the present leading to human error which strands a researcher in the Black Death, no matter how contrived the source of the disease may seem, but what about this symmetry appealed to Willis as a storyteller? I have to wonder, because despite Willis' obvious strengths as a writer, the two stories she tells here seemed to me an awkward fit. The character of Father Roche is too enigmatic, unassuming, and saintly to carry his central thematic role -- we see too little of him as a person to really feel his declaration of faith restored, or his spiritual salvation by the Jesus/God figures of Kivrin/Dunworthy (clever as that parallel may be).
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