2015 read #1: Blackout by Connie Willis.

Blackout by Connie Willis
492 pages
Published 2010
Read from January 1 to January 4
Rating: ★★★½ out of 5

Spoilers ahead, be warned.

Doomsday Book, the first of Willis' Oxford time travel novels I read, was an ambitious book with a wonky mishmash of tone: part comedy of manners, with academic bureaucracy and misunderstandings and overbearing mothers, and part melodrama, with two (count 'em) pandemics, a correspondingly high body count, and a Jesus allegory. To Say Nothing of the Dog, the best of the series so far, resolved the tonal dissonance by concentrating on the comedy aspect, resulting in one of the funniest sci-fi books I've encountered. Blackout, the first volume of what was supposed to be a single novel before it evidently got out of Willis' control, veers some distance in the other direction -- not quite all the way to melodrama, thankfully, but the emphasis is on stranded-in-the-past time travel adventure; humorous touches are plentiful, but aren't as central and plot-significant as they were in the first two books.

As an adventure story, however, Blackout has some significant problems, especially in pacing and a tendency toward "fakeout" cliffhangers. I neglected to note exactly when it became obvious that our three central heroes were going to be stuck in the London Blitz, but it was definitely no later than page 200. Yet each of our three heroes spends the next 250 or so pages waiting with increasing anxiety for their "drops" to open, making excuses for why they haven't opened, rationalizing the failure of retrieval teams to appear, setting out in search of other time travelers in order to use their drops, just missing each other in the confusion of train delays and bombed out rail lines, exposing Blackout's DNA as a missed-connections comedy without drawing any laughs from the confusion. Historical detail and Willis' "compulsively readable" prose maintain the story's momentum even as the plot stalls for those 250 pages, but I was nearing the limits of my engagement by the time our heroes finally found each other and, presumably, moved the plot forward to its next stage. That, however, is exactly the point at which Blackout ends. The rest of the story will be taken up in the 640-or-so pages of All Clear, the concluding volume.

Just as annoying as the stalled plot is Willis' fondness for ending chapters on cliffhangers that turn out to be not cliffhangers at all. While Mike, one of the time travelers, is stuck in a war hospital, driving himself batty with worry that his actions have changed history, someone bursts into the room, screaming that the Germans are invading and coming up the Thames; several chapters later, when we return to Mike's p.o.v., it turns out the other guy is a shellshock patient who screams of invasion whenever the air raid sirens go off. Toward the end, when the three heroes have found each other but fear their actions have changed who ends up dying in the Blitz, they find dozens of bodies outside a bombed store that should have had only three casualties; as the next chapter opens, it turns out the bodies were mannequins all along. Early on in the book, an entirely new character is introduced (possibly a different time traveler, or maybe even Mike under a new, assumed name later in the war), inflating decoy tanks in a field before D-Day, and finds himself staring down the horns of a bull; some chapters later, when we return to this scene, it resolves without injury, and the guy never appears in the book again, presumably to play a role in All Clear. The scene as a whole is pointless, except to introduce this new character who may or may not be someone we already know, and to show off Willis' research of the homefront effort in England. Dividing it into two chapters for the sake of a cheap cliffhanger is inexcusable.

In the same family as the fakeout cliffhanger is the "p.o.v. character has a vital clue that she or he will not share with the reader." It's a cheap ploy to build up mystery and suspense. It happens at least twice in Blackout: once right at the beginning, with Colin (the boy from Doomsday Book, now 17 and nursing a crush on one of our time travelers) rushing around, trying to get sent somewhen, anywhen back in time for "urgent" reasons; and once toward the end, when Polly (a time traveler with a literal deadline -- she can't survive all the way to V-E Day, because she visited V-E Day before and something something mechanics of time travel) decides she's figured out why the drops aren't opening and why the three of them are stuck in the Blitz, yet won't tell anyone, not even the reader. Colin's urgent mission turned out to be a plan to age himself via differential time travel so that he could be more age-appropriate for his crush; I guess All Clear will reveal whether Polly's insight is equally anticlimactic.

Despite all that, I'll do the stereotypical book-reviewer bit and say Blackout was hard to put down. Willis' prose is excellent, in an unobtrusive way; I care about the characters; I'm interested in where the story is going. I just hope it starts to go somewhere in the next book.